Learning Chef

Chapter 7. Cookbook Authoring and Use

Cookbooks are the fundamental component of infrastructure management with Chef. Think of a cookbook as a package for your recipes. Each cookbook represents the set of instructions required to configure or deploy a single unit of infrastructure such as a web server, database, or application. The recipes with code are only a small part of the entire equation. A cookbook also contains any supporting components, such as archives, images, or libraries. In addition, a cookbook holds configuration information, platform-specific implementations, and resource declarations required to manage a piece of infrastructure with Chef.

Your First Cookbook: Message of the Day

For your first cookbook, let’s automate the configuration of a message of the day on our guest node running CentOS 6. Let’s make it unambiguous that you have logged in to the guest node, by using Chef to configure a message on login stating that this is the guest node.

The command to generate an initial cookbook directory structure will differ, depending on whether you installed the Chef Development Kit or Chef Client on your host.

Even More Choices: Chef Versus Knife

Prior to the Chef Development Kit, developers were required to use many different command-line tools to perform routine actions. We hope that once the Chef Development Kit reaches its 1.0 release (which had not yet occurred at the time of this writing), all commands related to cookbook development will be unified under one umbrella ...