Chef: How to regenerate the validation key

  • November 12, 2014

Today I’ve lost the Chef validation key of one the servers that we have around. I haven’t found how to recover it in a quick Google search, so… good reason to write this short post.

The validation “thing”, is a client (not an user) in Chef which has permission to register new Chef clients to the server. To regenerate you have to remove the client and create it again:

knife client delete --delete-validators org-validator
knife client create org-validator --validator -f file_roots/chef-client/files/chef-validator-linode.pem