How do I bootstrap a node into chef server with "non root & non sudo" user?

Question

I have a node(VM) with a non-root user which does not have sudo permissions too. It will not be able to bootstrap the node since the non root non sudo user will have no access to /etc where the chef-client configuration files and cache reside.

Is it possible to achieve it with non root & non sudo user? Or do we have any hack or alternative to do it?

Answer 1

You can technically just run chef-client as any user. As you noted you'll need to reconfigure a bunch of directories like where to put the client key and where to write logs but Chef itself doesn't care what user it runs as. I say "technically" because running the client as something other than root isn't usually very useful as it can't do very much.