Running Chef-Solo on Windows: A quick guide

Today I decided to take a look at Chef (you know, this Infrastructure-as-code stuff) and see what it can do for me.
Sadly, installing a standalone version (“Chef Solo”) on a Windows box is not that simple, even if there are some instructions available. So, here is a step-by-step guide of what I did:

Install the Chef client (it is only available as an .MSI file – I would prefer a .ZIP or such, since the installer just copies a few files and modifies the PATH variable)

Create a Chef repository:

> git clone git://github.com/opscode/chef-repo.git
> cd chef-repo

Yes, this requires a Git client…

Configure Knife (the commandline interface) by creating the file .chef/knife.rb:

root = File.absolute_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
cookbook_path root + '/../cookbooks'

Download a sample cookbook:

> cd cookbooks
> knife cookbook site download getting-started
> tar zxvf getting-started-0.3.0-tar.gz
> del getting-started-0.3.0-tar.gz

Configure Chef-Solo by creating the files .chef/solo.rb…

root = File.absolute_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
file_cache_path root + '/..'
cookbook_path root + '/../cookbooks'

…and .chef/solo.json:

{
 "run_list": [ "recipe[getting-started::default]" ]
}

Run the recipe:
```
> chef-solo -c .chef/solo.rb -j .chef/solo.json
```
...which creates a "chef-getting-started.txt" file in your home directory.

Now you can create your own cookbook (“knife cookbook create my_cookbook”) and start cooking…