&gt;The Chef Server stack is somewhat complicated, though with an omnibus install you will rarely have to interact with it at that level.<p>Omnibus is the worst thing to happen to packaging. It bundles its own copy of <i>everything</i>.<p>Is anyone that&#x27;s not an Opscode employee capable of building Chef Server from source? I tried and failed. Software that can&#x27;t reasonably be built from source is proprietary in practice. I want to run Chef Server on Debian but I can&#x27;t because its seemingly impossible to build, so I can only use a platform that Opscode provides a pre-built binary for.  It&#x27;s a terrible situation to be in.