The metadata of any cookbook is defined in the metadata.rb file. It is used to define the basic information of a cookbook, for example, the name of the author, maintainer name, description, version, and most important dependencies. Dependencies are used by Berkshelf to download all the relevant cookbooks from the public or private repository.

Our metadata.rb file will look like the following code:

name             'wpblog'
maintainer       'YOUR_COMPANY_NAME'
maintainer_email 'YOUR_EMAIL'
license          'All rights reserved'
description      'Installs/Configures wpblog'
long_description IO.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'README.md'))
version          '0.1.0'
depends       'apt'
depends       'apache2'
depends       'php'
depends            'database'