Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

Managing cookbook dependencies with Berkshelf

It's a pain to manually ensure that you have installed all the cookbooks that another cookbook depends on. You must download each and every one of them manually only to find out that, with each downloaded cookbook, you inherit another set of dependent cookbooks.

And even if you use knife cookbook site install, which installs all the dependencies locally for you, your cookbook directory and your repository get cluttered with all those cookbooks. Usually, you don't really care about all those cookbooks and don't want to see or manage them.

This is where Berkshelf comes into play. It works like Bundler for Ruby gems, managing cookbook dependencies for you. Berkshelf downloads all the dependencies you defined ...