Learning Chef

Chapter 4. Write Your First Chef Recipe

Create a Directory Structure for Your Code

Since we will be writing a lot of code over the remainder of this book, let’s create a simple directory structure—organizing the code by chapter—like the one below (There is no need to use this exact directory structure to organize your files. It is only a suggestion. Use a system that makes sense to you):

learningchef
|_ chap04
|_ chap05
...
|_ chap16

In your home directory, create a subdirectory named learningchef, making it the current directory:

$ cd
$ mkdir learningchef
$ cd learningchef

Then create a chap04 subdirectory for the code examples you will be writing in this chapter. Make chap04 the current directory:

$ mkdir chap04
$ cd chap04

Follow a similar pattern for each new chapter, creating a new subdirectory underneath learningchef to contain each chapter’s examples. The code examples for this book follow this convention. When a specific directory structure is required for an example, we’ll let you know; otherwise, assume you can put the files anywhere you find convenient.

Write Your First Chef Recipe

To show you the basics, let’s write the simplest form of Chef code to make a “Hello World” recipe. A recipe is a file that contains Chef code.

Using your favorite text editor, create the recipe file hello.rb to match Example 4-1. This file can be anywhere—no specific directory structure is required. By convention, files that contain Chef code have the extension .rb to show they are written in Ruby. ...