The goal of these documents is to provide overviews of how various systems work inside Chef Server. If you encounter a process or feature that isn’t straightforward or took you time to understand consider writing an explanation here.

• High Level Architecture
• Search and Indexing
• Cookbook Upload Request Sequence Diagram
• Permissions Model - covers overall model including authz, authn
• Build and Test Pipelines
• FIPS - FIPS-mode support
• Development Environment Setup and Configuration
• Bookshelf

Undocumented

This is an ongoing list of documentation we would like to add. Please feel free to add more topics, or take on documenting one of them.

Secrets Management

• what is veil and how do we use it to keep internal passwords secure?
• which components use it?

API Request Flow

• What does an API request look like, from client to all of the back end components, and everything in between.
• What components and services get used? What is sync/async in that handling?

Automate Integration

• interaction diagram
• data collector - when/where/what data do we supply?
• authentication and configuration

Cookbook Dependency Solving

• definition of what it is, when/why it gets performed.
• How are depsolver requests handled, from end-to-end
• what are the depsolver components? (erlang, ruby, native gecode binding)

Pools

• How do we use pooler?
• What problems is it solving for us?
• Which components in Server use it?
• What does the flow look like for services

object model

The chef_object and chef_db model for managing, retrieving, and persisting Infra Server objects.

Metrics

Server has support for reporting into 2 or 3 different application metrics systems. Document:

• What they are
• What kind of metrics do we capture
• What components capture, and into which systems?