[chef] Best way to install from tarballs??

["Van Fossan,Randy" < >]

How is the best way to handle installations from tarballs?  Currently, we have several tarballs that we use to deploy software.  These tarballs are just extracted to the correct directory and the software is installed.

 

I want the software installation to be idempotent and not have the recipe do any more work than necessary.  I also want the recipe to replace a file that may have been overwritten by someone or some other process.    I do not want to have to extract the tarball on every run .  I considered extracting the tarball into the file portion of the cookbook, but it is in many cases several thousand files that is in these tarballs.

 

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Randy