All Chef installations require a central "workspace" - we call this the Chef Repository. This is a place where Chef primitive objects like cookbooks, roles, and data bags, are stored and managed. As such, we highly recommend keeping this repository under version control such as git, and treat it like source code.
"Knife" is the CLI (commonad line interface) to Chef. Inside the .chef directory of this project (you may need to show hidden files and folders to see it), you will find a knife.rb. This file holds configuration and settings for your project.
The knife.rb has been automatically created and customized for you. However, you may want to add additional configuration such as cloud provider options or knife plugins.
Also inside the .chef directory you will see two .pem files. These are private keys are used to authenticate your requests to the Chef Server. Your USERNAME.pem file is private and should never be shared. However your ORGANIZATION-validator.pem is global for your Hosted Chef Organization, and other Chef developers may require it. More information about knife.rb configuration options can be found in the documentation for knife.
A cookbook is the Chef primitive for telling a machine how to behave. A sample cookbook can be found in cookbooks/starter. After making changes to any cookbook, you must upload it to your Chef Server using knife:
$ knife upload cookbooks/starter
For more information about cookbooks, see the example files in the starter cookbook.
Roles provide logical grouping of cookbooks and other roles. A sample role can be found at roles/starter.rb.
Now that you have your Chef Repository ready to go, check out Learn Chef to proceed with your workstation setup. If you have any questions about Hosted Chef you can always ask our support team for a helping hand.