Chef: connection refused for cookbook upload

Solution 1:

To summarize the IRC session at https://github.com/chef/irc_log_archives/blob/master/chef/2013/2/23.log:

Chef-server redirects api clients between its components (in this case erchef and bookshelf). These redirects are based on the FQDN of the chef-server. If the server doesn't have a valid FQDN at install time, this can result in redirects to https://localhost:443.

One solution is to fix the FQDN on chef-server and run chef-server-ctl reconfigure.

Another solution is to set a few options in /etc/chef-server/chef-server.rb (I had to create this file) and then run chef-server-ctl reconfigure.

server_name = "192.168.114.11"
api_fqdn server_name

nginx['url'] = "https://#{server_name}"
nginx['server_name'] = server_name
lb['fqdn'] = server_name
bookshelf['vip'] = server_name