[chef] Re: Demonstrating the Power of Chef, Librarian and Vagrant

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Hi Jeremiah!

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Jeremiah Snapp
<
 >
 wrote:
> I created a chef-repo and documentation that should make it very easy to
> demonstrate the power of using Chef, Librarian and Vagrant together for
> iterative infrastructure building and testing.
>
> I hope this is helpful even to those who aren't necessarily new to Chef
> since one of the primary reasons I created this is to demonstrate how I
> manage cookbooks using Librarian.
>
> I've made some choices that are a little different than the wikis recommend
> but it has really helped me be able to decouple cookbooks from my chef-repo
> and more easily be able to contribute back to the community.

This is really cool, I was just tooling around with a similar approach
for my own personal Chef Repository! Jay is doing a great job with
Librarian.

Regarding this in the "Chef Cookbook Management" page:

"It used to be recommended that we customize cookbooks' templates,
files, recipes, etc by expecting knife cookbook upload to merge
multiple cookbook paths set in knife.rb cookbook_path (e.g. cookbooks,
site-cookbooks) but that is being deprecated."

I'd like to clarify what is being deprecated here.

The ability to have both a "cookbooks" and "site-cookbooks" (or
vendor-cookbooks, or whatever you want to name it) *is not* being
deprecated[0]. The ability to override a specific cookbook by
"shadowing" components in a second directory *is* deprecated[1]. To
illustrate with an example, suppose you had this your cookbook_path:

    cookbook_path ["./cookbooks", "./site-cookbooks"]

And then you downloaded Opscode's chef-client cookbook:

    > ls cookbooks/chef-client
    cookbooks/chef-client/* contents printed

But you want to modify the client.rb config file and put it in site-cookbooks:

    > tree site-cookbooks/chef-client
    site-cookbooks/chef-client
    └── templates
        └── default
            └── client.rb.erb

When uploading the chef-client cookbook, you'll get a deprecation
warning, which will be printed for each cookbook that exists in both
directories:

    > knife cookbook upload chef-client
    WARNING: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * *
    WARNING: The cookbooks: chef-client exist in multiple places in
your cookbook_path.
    A composite version of these cookbooks has been compiled for uploading.

    IMPORTANT: In a future version of Chef, this behavior will be
removed and you will no longer
    be able to have the same version of a cookbook in multiple places
in your cookbook_path.
    WARNING: The affected cookbooks are located:
    chef-client:
        /home/jtimberman/tmp/c/cookbooks/chef-client
        /home/jtimberman/tmp/c/site-cookbooks/chef-client
    WARNING: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * *
    Uploading chef-client             [1.1.2]
    Uploaded 1 cookbook.

It does upload fine because this hasn't been completely deprecated
(i.e., removed).

However, if you simply wanted to make your own "site specific"
cookbook in the site-cookbooks directory and it didn't overlap with
one in cookbooks, then it will be as normal:

    > mkdir -p site-cookbooks/normal-things/recipes
    > touch site-cookbooks/normal-things/recipes/default.rb
    > knife cookbook upload normal-things
    Uploading normal-things             [0.0.1]
    Uploaded 1 cookbook.

TL;DR: you can have multiple directories in your cookbook_path and
that's fine as long as you don't duplicate a cookbook between them,
then you'll see the warning.

[0]: unless someone decided that and didn't tell me :-).
[1]: http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2308

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