Example of Chef workflow

Here is a quick example of a Chef workflow that has been working for us. It can be easily improved on, especially around testing, but it's a good foundation.

1) Put your chef-repo on Github.
2) When you want to modify a cookbook, do a git pull to get the latest version of the cookbook.
3) Modify the cookbook.
4) Check your environments (I'll assume staging and production for now, to keep it simple) to see what version of the cookbook is used in production vs staging. Let's assume both staging and production environments use the latest version of the cookbook, say 0.1.
5) Modify metadata.rb and bump up the version of the cookbook to 0.2.
6) Modify the staging environment file (for example environments/stg.rb) and pin the cookbook you modified to version 0.2. Make sure the production environment is still pinned to 0.1.
7) Update the staging environment on the Chef server via: 'knife environment from file environments/stg.rb'
8) Upload the new version of the cookbook (0.2) to the Chef server via: 'knife cookbook upload mycookbook' (it should report version 0.2 after the upload)
9) Run chef-client on a staging box that uses the cookbook you modified. Check that everything looks good.
10) Assuming everything looks good in staging, modify the production environment file (for example environments/prod.rb) and pin the cookbook you modified to the new version 0.2.
11) Update the production environment on the Chef server via: 'knife environment from file environments/prod.rb'.
12) Run chef-client on a prod box and check that everything is OK. If it looks good, either let chef-client run by itself on all prod boxes, or run chef-client manually to force the change.
13) Commit your coobook and environment changes into git and push to Github.

Note that there is the possibility of screw-ups if somebody forgets step #13. For this reason, I usually am double careful and check especially my local version of the environment files (stg.rb and prod.rb) against what is actually running on the Chef server. I run 'knife environment show stg' and compare the result to stg.rb. I also run 'knife environment show prod' and compare the result to prod.rb. Only if they both look good do I modify my local copies of stg.rb and prod.rb and then upload them to the Chef server. We've had issues in the past with changes that were made to the Chef server directly (via 'knife environment edit') that got overwritten when somebody uploaded their version of the environment file that contained an older version of the given cookbook. For this reason I don't recommed making changes directly on the Chef server by editing roles, environments, etc, but instead making all changes on your local files, then uploading those files to Chef and also committing those changes to Github.

As I said in the beginning, there is the opportunity to run various testing tools (at a minimum rubocop and Foodcritic) on your cookbook before uploading it to the Chef server. But that is for another post.