Jon Cowie

When you start to use the Chef configuration management system, you will quickly encounter a tool it ships with called Ohai which collects information about the underlying system to expose to the Chef Client as attributes during its run. These attributes allows you to easily incorporate system-specific behavior into your Chef cookbooks, for example allowing you to create a single “package” resource in your cookbook which automatically detects whether to install packages from Yum when running on a Redhat based Linux distribution or from Apt when running on a Debian based distribution. Read more…