[chef] Re: AWS OpsWorks custom

[Zac Stevens < >]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 1:42 AM, < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I'm a bit confused on how to structure this.  I believe I need to point my
OpsWorks stack to a github repo that contains the cookbooks.  That's done in
the stack configuration:
"Use custom Chef Cookbooks"
OpsWorks requires the repo to be structured like this:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/workingcookbook-installingcustom-repo.html

I've seen some mentions of using git submodel to incorporate the required repos
in a "parent" repo.  I've also read that that practice is deprecated.  What
*is* the best practice?

I've looked into Bershelf and Librarian-chef, but don't see an easy way to end
up with the required directory structure while still being able to add new
cookbooks and modify the existing ones.  I'm trying to avoid just making a copy
of the cookbooks.  I think I also need to make sure dependencies can be
satisfied.

If I was doing this, I'd use Berkshelf.  I would create a Berksfile to declare the cookbooks I was using.  The process to deploy updated cookbooks would be:

 1) run "berks install" to copy them into a local directory

 2) created a tarball of the directory

 3) upload the tarball to S3

This can be trivially scripted.

Zac