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About Chef Habitat

Chef Habitat centers application configuration, management, and behavior around the application itself, not the infrastructure that the app runs on. It provides automation that can programmatically and declaratively build, deploy, and manage your application and services, both stateful and stateless. You can deploy and run your Chef Habitat app on many different infrastructure environments including bare metal, VM, containers, and PaaS.

Chef Habitat Builder

Chef Habitat Builder acts as the core of Chef’s Application Delivery Enterprise hub. You can run Chef Habitat Builder as a cloud-based service or on-premises.

Chef Habitat Builder provides package storage, search, and an API for clients.

The contents of your app are stored in the Chef Habitat Builder SaaS, where the Chef Habitat community can view and access them. You can also use the on-prem version of Chef Habitat Builder, where you can store and maintain your apps locally.

Plans

A plan is the file where you define how you will build, deploy, and manage your app. A plan file is named plan.sh for Linux systems or plan.ps1 for Windows, and your app can have plan files for both Linux and Windows operating systems. You can find your plan file in the habitat directory, which you install at the root of your app with hab plan init.

Supervisor

A Supervisor is a process manager that runs the app packages that you defined in your plan. A Supervisor has two primary responsibilities:

  1. A Supervisor is a process manager and is responsible for running your app’s services. It starts, stops, updates, and monitors the services according to your plan.
  2. Supervisors can talk to each other. You can connect Supervisors together into a network and instruct them to send information to each other and take actions based on that information.

Services

A service is your Chef Habitat package that is run and managed by a Supervisor. Services can be joined together into a service group, which is a collection of services with the same package and topology type that are connected together across a Supervisor network.

Installing Chef Habitat

The Chef Habitat CLI can be installed on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

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