Cookbook Authoring and Use - Learning Chef - page 148

Completing Define Prerequisites might help focus your thoughts when you are creating a
new cookbook. As you gain more experience writing Chef recipes, the thought process in-
volved in developing a plan for your cookbook will become second nature without the need
to formalize the plan in a checklist.
Define Prerequisites
Table 7-1. Cookbook authoring checklist
Name
Purpose
Success criteria
App/Service
Required steps
Name
Although it might seem trivial, choosing a proper and descriptive name for a cookbook is
absolutely critical. Because a cookbook's name must be unique across your organization,
you only have one chance to name it properly. For example, you can only have one
“mysql” cookbook in your organization. A cookbook's name is also an abbreviated state-
ment of work and should follow the principle of least surprise. For example, the “mysql”
cookbook should deal exclusively with MySQL.
Purpose
The purpose or goal of a cookbook is the second-most important prerequisite when creat-
ing a cookbook. A cookbook without a proper vision is certain to fail, if not immediately,
then in the long term due to scope creep resulting in untestable code. The following is a
vision statement for our mysql cookbook:
To install and configure the MySQL server and MySQL client on a target machine.
The vision is sometimes closely tied to the metadata's description attribute, but this is
not a requirement.