Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

Creating custom knife plugins

Knife, the command-line client for the Chef server, has a plugin system. This plugin system enables us to extend the functionality of knife in any way we need. The knife-ec2 plugin is a common example: It adds commands such as ec2 server create to knife.

In this section, we will create a very basic custom knife plugin to learn about all the required building blocks of knife plugins. As knife plugins are pure Ruby programs that can use any external libraries, there are no limits to what you can make knife do. This freedom enables you to build your whole DevOps workflow on knife, if you want to.

Now, let's teach knife how to tweet in your name!

Getting ready

Make sure you have a Twitter user account and have created an ...