Chef recipes are declarative, which means that it provides a high-level language for describing what to do to accomplish the task at hand without requiring that you provide a specific implementation or procedure. This means that you can focus on building recipes and modeling infrastructure using abstract resources so that it is clear what is happening without having to know how it is happening. Take, as an example, a portion of the recipes we looked at earlier for deploying an IIS application that is responsible for installing some Windows features:
features = %w{IIS-ISAPIFilter IIS-ISAPIExtensions
NetFx3ServerFeatures NetFx4Extended-ASPNET45
IIS-NetFxExtensibility45}
features.each do |f|
windows_feature f do
action :install
end
endBecause of Chef's declarative language, the preceding section of code reads in a natural way. We have a list of features. For each of those features, which we know to be Windows features, install...