Make sure you have a cookbook named my_cookbook, and the run_list command of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks recipe in this chapter.

Edit the metadata of your cookbook in the file cookbooks/my_cookbook/metadata.rb to add a dependency to the build-essential cookbook:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/metadata.rb
...
depends 'build-essential'
depends 'apache2', '>= 1.0.4'

If you want to use a feature of another cookbook inside your cookbook, you will need to include the other cookbook in your recipe using the include_recipe directive:

include_recipe 'build-essential'

To tell the Chef server that your cookbook requires the build-essential cookbook, you need to declare that dependency in the metadata.rb file. If you uploaded all the dependencies to your Chef server either using berks install and berks upload or knife cookbook upload ..., the Chef server will then send all the required cookbooks to the node.

The second depends call tells the Chef server that your cookbook depends on a version of the apache2 cookbook, which is greater or equal to the version 1.0.4. You may use any of these version constraints with your depends calls:

If you include another recipe inside your recipe, without declaring the cookbook dependency in your metadata.rb file, Foodcritic will warn you:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ foodcritic cookbooks/my_cookbook

FC007: Ensure recipe dependencies are reflected in cookbook metadata: cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb:9

Additionally, you can declare conflicting cookbooks through the conflicts call:

conflicts "nginx"

Of course, you can use version constraints exactly the way you did with depends.