Is it possible to install chef-solo without root privilege

Question

We have been facing with a lot of issues with Linux team about installing stuff on a VM. We are not given any root access and as far as I understand chef is impossible to install without root privilege at all. Am I correct? If I'm wrong is there anyway I can install chef-solo on Centos 5.x without root access? I have run the command from chef website

curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | bash

And I got permission denied error which of course I don't have root access. Is there anyway to workaround this issue?

Answer 1

Sure - you can install Chef as a gem as non-root if you're running rvm or a similar userspace gem manager.

$ gem install chef
Fetching: chef-11.6.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed chef-11.6.0
1 gem installed

$ which chef-solo
/Users/tpot/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p327/bin/chef-solo