[chef] Announcing zap-0.0.1

[Joe Nuspl < >]

Ohai!

At the summit, I gave a presentation on the zap cookbook.  Navigating my employer's legal department proved daunting so I did a clean room reimplementation hosted at https://github.com/nvwls/zap.

v0.0.1 only supports the zap_directory LWRP.  Support for cron and services are planned next.  Enjoy!

From the README:

Library cookbook for building authoritative resource sets.

One of the common pitfalls in chef land is the pattern of one deleting a resource definition from a recipe and the user wondering why the resource still exists on the system.

For example, on Monday a cronjob is added:

cron 'collect stats' do
  action    :create
  minute    0
  command '/usr/local/bin/collect-stats | mailto 
 
 ">
 '
end

After a few days, the issue is figured out and that cron resource is removed from the recipe. After uploading the new cookbook, they wonder why they are still receiving email.

The issue that chef is great for describing actions. I mean, action is part of the DSL.

At the 2013 Opscode Communit Summit, Matt Ray and I had discussion regarding this issue. The name authoritative cookbook was coined. If chef is deploying files to a .d directory, if there are files in that directory not converged by a resource, those files should be removed.

This pattern has been added to https://github.com/Youscribe/sysctl-cookbook