Cookbooks are one of the fundamental components of the Chef system. They are containers for recipes, providers, resources, templates, and all the logic and information required to manage your infrastructure. This chapter covers the following:
Organization of cookbooks
Building cookbooks
Developing recipes
Handling multiple platforms for a cookbook organization
Cookbooks are one of the core components of Chef. They are, as their name suggests, a collection of recipes and other data that when combined provide a specific set of functionality to a system administrator. In each cookbook, you will find a collection of directories and files that describe the cookbook and its recipes and functionality. The core components of a cookbook are as follows:
Cookbook metadata
Attributes
Recipes
Templates
Definitions
Resources
Providers
Ruby libraries
Support files
A cookbook is a collection of files and directories with a well-known structure. Not every cookbook has all of these components...