Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Second Edition

Using libraries

You can use arbitrary Ruby code within your recipes. As long as your logic isn't too complicated, it's totally fine to keep it inside your recipe. However, as soon as you start using plain Ruby more than Chef DSL, it's time to the move logic into external libraries.

Libraries provide a place to encapsulate Ruby code so that your recipes stay clean and neat.

In this section, we'll create a simple library to see how this works.

Getting ready

Make sure you have a cookbook called my_cookbook and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in Creating and using cookbooks recipe of Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure.

How to do it...

Let's create a library and use it in a cookbook:

1. Create a helper method in your own cookbook's ...