Hi Sean, Reality Forge wrote a blog
post a few months ago that I've been using to model some
experiments.
http://realityforge.org/code/2012/11/19/role-cookbooks-and-wrapper-cookbooks.html
We're working through a lot of your same issues at the moment and
I'm not sure I have any comments yet on how we are experimenting
with the overall wrapping structure, but I can tell you how I've
been writing the "library" cookbooks. My general approach right
now is, if I'm engaged in writing a cookbook I think will become a
general use cookbook, I iterate like this:
Write a recipe to define optimal flow, test the recipe to make
sure it's working like I think it should.
If I have time, I refactor it back into a definition or LWRP which
is a good way to abstract attributes and hide code from devs,
creating a clean interface for them.
If I don't have time, I parametrize with default attributes and
write up notes in the README about how to override the attrs from
a wrapper implementation .
LIke I said, we're still experimenting with wrapper
implementations, so I don't have many comments on that yet.
Hopefully the blog link above helps. If you are looking for an
example, I pasted an innocuous set of snippets showing a template
block from a recipe associated attributes file in both a library
cookbook and the wrapper. I'm no authority and YMMV and all that
stuff, but these are certainly good questions to ask as many
people are discovering.
Good Luck on your adventures.
Sascha
Sascha Bates
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On 1/18/13 5:37 PM, Sean McKenna wrote:
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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