[chef] Re: cookbook lib requiring gem

[Joshua Timberman < >]

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Hello!

On Feb 23, 2011, at 11:22 AM, Andreas Kollegger wrote:

> What's the appropriate way to require a non-standard gem for a cookbook's 
> library? I'm adding a zip.rb library to my cookbook, but it requires 
> 'archive/zip' to do the actual work. 
> 
> Should manually installing that gem be a pre-requisite,  or is there a 
> clever way to bootstrap it with the gem_package resource in the recipe that 
> uses it? 
> 
> Or, is relying on extra gems frowned upon?


Not at all frowned on, and it is an encouraged feature of Chef :). In the 
recipe:

    g = gem_package "archive-zip" do
      action :nothing
    end

    g.run_action(:install)
    require 'rubygems'
    Gem.clear_paths
    require 'archive/zip'

You can see an example of this in a few of Opscode's cookbooks, such as 'aws':

https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/blob/master/aws/recipes/default.rb


- -- 
Opscode, Inc
Joshua Timberman, Technical Evangelist
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman

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