Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation

Writing recipes

As you have already seen, cookbooks provide a way to combine relevant pieces of configuration data such as attributes, templates, resources, providers, and definitions in one place. The only reason these components exist is to support our recipes. Recipes combine resources in a certain order to produce the desired outcome; much in the same way a chef would combine ingredients according to his or her recipe to produce some delicious food. By putting all of these resources together, we can build our own recipes that range from very simple single-step recipes to multistep, multiplatform recipes.

Starting out small

A very basic recipe, as we have discussed before, might only leverage one or two resources. One of the simplest conceivable ...