Using community exception and report handlers

When running your Chef client as a daemon on your nodes, you usually have no idea whether everything works as expected. Chef comes with a feature named Handlers, which helps you to find out what's going on during your Chef client runs.

There are a host of community handlers available, for example, to report Chef client run results to IRC, via e-mail, to Slack, Nagios, or Graphite. You name it.

In this section, we'll see how to install an IRC handler as an example. The same method is applicable to all other available handlers.

Note

For a full list of available community handlers, go to http://docs.chef.io/community_plugin_report_handler.html

Getting ready

To install community exception and report handlers, you need to add the chef_handler cookbook to your Berksfile first:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
cookbook 'chef_handler'

How to do it…

Let's see how to install and use one of the community handlers:

1. Create your own cookbook to install community...