Roles - Learning Chef

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Because cookbooks are versioned, a pattern of using a role cookbook in lieu of using the run

list feature of roles is one technique many Chef developers use. They still use roles for com-

mon attributes, but the role run list is moved to a cookbook. A recipe can emulate a role run

list easily through the use of the include_recipe command we introduced in In-

clude_Recipe .

For example, in this case, we could create a webserver cookbook where the default recipe

includes the apache cookbook:

#

# Cookbook Name:: webserver

# Recipe:: default

#

include_recipe "motd"

include_recipe "user"

include_recipe "apache"

Nodes could still include the webserver role as a classification mechanism and for any

shared attributes. It can still be handy to run this command to find all the web servers on

your network:

knife search node role : webserver

NOTE

chef-zero currently does not seem to index roles for searching, so the preceding com-

mand will not work with the test setup in this chapter. Instead, you'll need to use a full

Chef Server setup.

In this scenario, the run list of the webserver role would be blank, and instead nodes would

add the cookbook recipe[webserver] to their run list. Cookbooks are versioned, and with

environments, which we'll introduce in the next chapter, you can ensure that a subset of

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