Community and the Chef-Client Cookbook - Learning Chef - page 223

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Always verify that the cookbook's license is suitable for your organization!
WHAT IS A COMMUNITY COOKBOOK?
A community cookbook is a tarball ( .tar.gz ) package of the cookbook structure dis-
cussed Chapter 7 . It is packaged in this manner for easy cross-platform distribution. At its
core, a community cookbook is exactly the same as an internally authored cookbook.
The best place to find free community cookbooks is the Chef Supermarket . This site is a
Ruby on Rails application hosted and maintained by Chef Software where you can share,
contribute, download, use, rate, and review community cookbooks. Chef Supermarket is akin
to rubygems.org , cpan.org , and other focused distribution sites. You can log in to Chef Su-
permarket using the same credentials as your Hosted Enterprise Chef account. Once you
have logged in, you will be able to comment on and follow cookbooks of interest and con-
tribute your own cookbooks to the community.
NOTE
You do not need to log in to the Chef Marketplace to download or use its community
cookbooks.
The Chef Supermarket lets you search for cookbooks by name or description as shown in
Figure 10-1 .
Chef Supermarket will query cookbook names, descriptions, platforms, categories, and other
metadata. You can even sort results by most downloaded or most followed . Take time explor-
ing to find the best cookbooks for you.
If you do not find the cookbook you are looking for at Chef Supermarket, your next obvious
bet is a good old-fashioned Internet search. Chef Supermarket is not the sole authority on
cookbooks; GitHub also has good cookbooks, such as Fletcher Nichol's rvm cookbook.