Signing up for a Chef server

The Chef server is the central repository of cookbooks and other policy items governing our entire infrastructure. It contains metadata about the infrastructure that we are managing. In our case, the Chef server contains the cookbook, policy, and metadata on our Docker host.

To prepare a Chef server, we will simply sign up for a hosted Chef server. A free Chef server account allows us to manage up to five nodes in our infrastructure. Follow the next few steps to prepare a hosted Chef server account:

1. Go to https://manage.chef.io/signup and fill out the form for our account details as shown in the following screenshot:

1. After creating a user account, the hosted Chef server will now prompt us to create an organization. Organizations are simply used to manage role-based access control for our Chef server. Create an organization by providing the details on the form and click on the Create Organization button.

1. We are now almost done getting our hosted Chef server account. Finally, click on Download Starter Kit. This will download a ZIP file containing our starter chef-repo. We will talk more about the chef-repo in the next section: