After extracting the deployment-archive.zip on the target machine, you can run the deploy.sh, it will guide you to some very basic questions for the installation. In fact it queries, the environment the node is placed in and the node file that should be used for installation. Let's examine, what choices you have.

Environment Option

The deploy.sh script will prompt you with all available environments and this will be determined by the environment JSON files found below environments in the extracted directory.

The Chef environment concept is a topology based construct to group servers into environments. The most common environment set is based on the three environments development, staging and production. In the deployment-archive these environments are represented by the environment cookbook blueprint.

An environment cookbook encapsulates attributes per environment in environment specific recipes. By doing so, these attributes are packaged as a cookbook and can be versioned and deployed safely. There can only be one environment cookbook in a Chef setup.

Setting the environment to development will result in running the recipe[blueprint::_development] recipe at the start of the chef run, when the role[base] is included.

In order to keep your node files clean and environment independent as possible, you should configure as many aspects as possible in the corresponding environment recipes.

Node Config Option

The deploy.sh script will look for all node files in the nodes folder in the extracted directory.