Chapter 6. Cookbooks and LWRPs

So, we have learned how to manage different components of our infrastructure using the concept of resources. We also learned what a recipe is and how to handle attributes.

Recipes are nothing but simple Ruby code that defines how the system is going to get to a particular state. A system is comprised of multiple components and each of these components is handled by means of resources.

A resource is a statement of configuration policy. It describes the desired state of an element in our system. It also describes how that state can be achieved. Each resource statement in a Chef recipe corresponds to a specific part of infrastructure: a file, a cron job, a package, a service, and so on.

Recipes group together these resource statements and describe the working configuration of the entire system.

The recipes by themselves aren't good enough to configure a concerned host and we need to manage configuration files, along with packages, services, users,...