Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Matthias Marschall
Book Image

Chef Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Matthias Marschall

Overview of this book

Chef is a configuration management tool that lets you automate your more cumbersome IT infrastructure processes and control a large network of computers (and virtual machines) from one master server. This book will help you solve everyday problems with your IT infrastructure with Chef. It will start with recipes that show you how to effectively manage your infrastructure and solve problems with users, applications, and automation. You will then come across a new testing framework, InSpec, to test any node in your infrastructure. Further on, you will learn to customize plugins and write cross-platform cookbooks depending on the platform. You will also install packages from a third-party repository and learn how to manage users and applications. Toward the end, you will build high-availability services and explore what Habitat is and how you can implement it.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Chef Cookbook - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Extending community cookbooks by using application wrapper cookbooks


Using community cookbooks is great. However, sometimes they do not exactly match your use case. You may need to modify them. If you don't want to use Git vendor branches that are generated by knife cookbook site install, you'll need to use the library versus application cookbook approach.

In this approach, you don't touch the community (library) cookbook. Instead, you include it in your own application cookbook and modify resources from the library cookbook.

Let's see how to extend a community cookbook with your own application cookbook.

Getting ready

We'll use the ntp cookbook as the library cookbook and will change a command it executes.

Add the ntp cookbook to your Berksfile:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
source 'https://supermarket.chef.io'
cookbook 'ntp'

How to do it…

Let's see how we can override the ntp cookbook's behavior from within our own cookbook:

  1. Create your own application cookbook:

    mma@laptop:~/chef-repo...