Community and the Chef-Client Cookbook - Learning Chef - page 222

Chapter 10. Community and the
Chef-Client Cookbook
In this chapter we'll be talking about the Chef community and community cookbooks. The
Chef community site provides access to great Chef resources, including cookbooks, knife
plug-ins, and the ability to connect to amazing people who create wonderful things built on
Chef.
Before we get started, make sure you are running Chef Server and the node you created in
Chapter 9 . We'll be making heavy use of the knife command line tool in this chapter, and it
requires a Chef Server setup to function.
Using Community Cookbooks
Although we've been writing all the cookbooks and recipes we've used so far in this topic,
so you can learn Chef coding, there is an easier way. There are hundreds of freely available
prewritten Chef cookbooks to install and configure a variety of commonly used services and
applications in production environments. For instance, there are cookbooks to help you set
up Apache, Nginx, and IIS web servers and MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
and Oracle databases. There are cookbooks to support the deployment of apps written in
Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, node.js, and much, much more!
You can browse and download these community cookbooks from Chef Software's Chef Su-
permarket community hub, and from a variety of other locations including GitHub. Some of
these cookbooks were created and are maintained by Chef Software, but the majority are de-
veloped by Chef users. In general, as with any third-party software, you should always inde-
pendently verify the behavior and flexibility of a community cookbook in an isolated envir-
onment before using it in production.