Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7. Cookbook Authoring and
Use
Cookbooks are the fundamental component of infrastructure management with Chef. Think
of a cookbook as a package for your recipes. Each cookbook represents the set of instruc-
tions required to configure or deploy a single
unit
of infrastructure such as a web server,
database, or application. The recipes with code are only a small part of the entire equation. A
cookbook also contains any supporting components, such as archives, images, or libraries. In
addition, a cookbook holds configuration information, platform-specific implementations,
and resource declarations required to manage a piece of infrastructure with Chef.
Your First Cookbook: Message of the Day
For your first cookbook, let's automate the configuration of a
message of the day
on our
guest node running CentOS 6. Let's make it unambiguous that you have logged in to the
guest node, by using Chef to configure a message on login stating that this is the guest node.
The command to generate an initial cookbook directory structure will differ, depending on
whether you installed the Chef Development Kit or Chef Client on your host.
