How to Automate the Chef Habitat Builder Setup

Skyler Layne
DevOps Specialist

There has been a steep rise in the adoption of Chef Habitat by large enterprises who want to package their legacy applications to be deployed on a hybrid cloud. As DevOps experts for Fortune 500 Enterprises, Indellient are experiencing this trend first-hand; every week, we perform multiple deployments of on-prem Chef Habitat Builders for our clients.

Repeating this process over and over again pushed us towards finding ways to optimize it – the result was a package that automates the setup of a Chef Habitat Builder once it’s deployed to your server. The script codifies the entire process by seamlessly automating the manual steps and making them easily reproducible and scalable.

Today, we are happy to announce that we are open sourcing the package for the benefit of the Chef Habitat community.

In essence, it will:

  • Create a proxy user
  • Prepare the Auth token for origin creation of package synchronization

You can clone or download the package here:
https://github.com/Indellient/hab_builder_seed  

We plan to fully support the community in this effort; all issues and feature requests are welcome!

Getting Started

Getting started with the script is a simple two-step process:

  1. First you need to deploy the Chef Habitat Builder Depot
  2. Second, you need to execute the binary on the Chef Habitat Builder Depot machine. The steps for this are outlined in the documentation

For more information on delivering automation with Chef Habitat Builder Depot, you can view my talk from ChefConf 2019.

Indellient’s Open Source Work for Chef Habitat

Open-sourcing this package aligns with Indellient’s overall mission of providing value for not just our clients but the entire DevOps industry. In the past, we have open sourced two packages (see links below) and moving forward we plan to open source more code – with the end-goal of helping DevOps practitioners transform into DevOps all-stars!


Indellient is a Software Development Company that specializes in Data Analytics, Cloud Development ApplicationDevOps Services, and Business Process Management.

About The Author

Skyler Layne

Hi, I’m Skyler Layne. I’m a Senior DevOps Specialist at Indellient. I’ve been involved in a number of Chef implementations including cookbooks, Chef Infra, Chef InSpec and Chef Habitat. I’ve also worked on one of the largest Chef Habitat implementations to date. Beyond my love for all things DevOps, I’m a fountain pen and stationary fanatic.