Cookbook Authoring and Use - Learning Chef - page 127

EVEN MORE CHOICES: CHEF VERSUS KNIFE
Prior to the Chef Development Kit, developers were required to use many different command-line
tools to perform routine actions. We hope that once the Chef Development Kit reaches its 1.0 re-
lease (which had not yet occurred at the time of this writing), all commands related to cookbook
development will be unified under one umbrella chef command-line tool.
Before the Chef Development Kit, knife , the primary command-line tool for working with a
Chef Server, could also be used to create a cookbook directory structure for development.
Now, with the advent of the Chef Development Kit, the chef generate command is the recom-
mended way to manage a cookbook's directory structure. The knife tool won't be going away. It
continues to be the primary command-line tool for interacting with Chef Server in production,
which we'll see later in Chapter 9 .
However, there is some new functionality in the chef generate subcommand that doesn't exist
in knife . chef generate allows you to customize the recipe and cookbook templates that are
generated. Also, chef generate lets you create the directory structure incrementally in a pro-
gressive fashion, adding just the features you need for your cookbook. knife generates only one
type of structure, with everything at once, creating many more files than you might need. It
doesn't hurt anything, but many people prefer the incremental approach of chef generate .
We'll cover both the chef and knife approaches to cookbook creation in this chapter.
If you have the Chef Development Kit installed, continue on to the next section, Your First
Cookbook: Message of the Day (Chef Development Kit) , to learn how to create a cookbook
using the chef utility. If you have the Chef Client installed, skip ahead to Your First Cook-
book: Message of the Day (Chef Client) to learn how to create a cookbook using the knife
utility.
Your First Cookbook: Message of the Day (Chef
Development Kit)
You'll be using a tool called chef to generate an initial directory structure for a message of
the day cookbook (motd). chef is a new common utility command that debuted with the
Chef Development Kit. On a command line, run the chef generate cookbook motd com-
mand to create the cookbook directory scaffolding. chef generate will create a main direct-
ory for your cookbook called motd as part of the process: