Chef

“”I have containerised many of our small sites which previously built using bespoke methods in our Chef codebase as part of the "configuration as code" setup.

— Grant Slater, OpenStreetMap Foundation (2023)

“”The whole server configuration is done via Chef, so even server configuration is pure git-versioned code.

— Michał Frąckowiak, Wikidot (2020)

Wikipedia (2023)

Chef is a configuration management tool. It is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's server to automatically provision and configure new machines.

It uses a pure-Ruby domain-specific language for writing system configuration "recipes". The user writes "recipes" that describe how Chef manages server applications, utilities and how they are to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state : packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written.

Chef was created by Adam Jacob as a tool for his consulting company, whose business model was to build end-to-end server deployment tools.

GlobeNewswire (2020)

Progress Announces Acquisition of Chef

Founded in 2008, Chef products include : Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, Chef Infra , Chef InSpec, Chef Habitat, Chef Compliance and Chef Desktop

Progress will acquire Chef for $220 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments.