[chef] Introducing chef-ingredient

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Ohai, Chefs!

I'd like to introduce a new cookbook for managing Chef's products (Chef Server, Analytics, etc), chef-ingredient. You may be familiar with the chef-server-ingredient cookbook, and wonder why we have yet another cookbook for this.

We feel it should be easy to manage our products. We also feel that users shouldn't need to know as many underlying details when we can create reasonable, simple abstractions. The chef-ingredient cookbook has three resources to facilitate this:

* chef_ingredient: manages a Chef product installation, and can populate its configuration. For example `chef-server` and `/etc/opscode/chef-server.rb`.

* omnibus_service: manages a sub-service in an omnibus server product. For example, `chef-server/rabbitmq`.

* ingredient_config: manages the configuration file for the specified product using the config from the corresponding `chef-ingredient`.

The cookbook itself is shared on Supermarket and GitHub. The README.md describes the resources in more detail.

* https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/chef-ingredient

* https://github.com/chef-cookbooks/chef-ingredient

For examples of use, see the test cookbook in the repository. Along with this cookbook, we have added two additional cookbooks for managing the apt or yum repositories for the Chef products. These leverage the apt_repository and yum_repository resources using attribute-driven recipes, so users can implement alternate repositories (such as internal).

* https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/apt-chef

* https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/yum-chef

All three of these cookbooks are intended to be very well tested, and serve as examples, too.

We're working to update the chef-server and chef-server-cluster cookbooks to use chef-ingredient soon - in the next week or so.

Cheers,

Joshua