[chef-dev] help on best practices for roles and wrappers

[Sean McKenna < >]

Hi,

 

We have been using Chef for a while at my company and have been very happy with it.

 

We’ve come to a point where we are making a few changes to the way we use Chef.

 

I’d like to use wrapper cookbooks to wrap generic cookbooks that we can contribute back to upstream. I’d also like to use role cookbooks so that we can version our roles and make incremental changes to the runlists of our machines without risking blowing up prod and without having to do the role-renaming dance. At least that is my thought as of right now.

 

We’ve actually had a good deal of debate on the subject and are working on coming to a consensus, which brings me to the point. Besides the Gangnam-style one (http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-write-reusable-chef-cookbooks.html) and a few other high level articles, I haven’t been able to find anything on how people are really doing this (i.e. versioning roles by using role cookbooks and / or using wrapper cookbooks) and what the best practices are.

 

Any help or direction to info sources would be much appreciated.

 

Thanks!

Sean