How To Install Chef Workstation on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Chef Workstation on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, A Chef is a configuration management tool that simplifies manual and repetitive tasks for infrastructure management. With the Chef users can easily manage, configure and deploy the resources across the network from the centralized location irrespective of the environment (cloud, on-premises, or hybrid). Chef Workstation comes with all the necessary packages and tools such as Chef-CLI, Knife, Chef Infra Client, and more.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Chef Workstation on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Chef Workstation on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install apt-transport-https

Step 2. Installing Chef Workstation on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Install Chef Workstation via its APT Repository.

Now run the commands below to install the public key for Chef software:

wget -qO - https://packages.chef.io/chef.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Next, add Chef repository:

echo "deb https://packages.chef.io/repos/apt/stable focal main" > chef-stable.list

Now, you will need to update the package repository list by running the below command:

sudo mv chef-stable.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

Finally, run the commands below to update and install Chef Workstation:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install chef-workstation

• Install Chef Workstation from Script.

To install via Chef script, simply run the commands below:

curl -L https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh | sudo bash

Once done, check the status of Chef run the commands below:

chef -v

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Chef. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Chef Workstation on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Chef website.