Cookbooks

While recipes in the world of Chef are a fundamental unit of execution, a cookbook is the fundamental unit of configuration and policy distribution. A cookbook is a container that is responsible for holding everything. It is needed to configure a component of a system, be it the attributes, configuration files, templates, custom resources (more about resources later in this chapter), recipes, versions, metadata, or libraries/helper functions; everything is packed into a cookbook and is used later on during the execution of Chef code when run_list is expanded during the chef-client run on the concerned machine.

Authoring a cookbook

A cookbook has the following directory structure:

|-- CHANGELOG.md
|-- README.md
|-- attributes
|-- definitions
|-- files
|   `-- default
|-- libraries
|-- metadata.rb
|-- providers
|-- recipes
|   `-- default.rb
|-- resources
`-- templates
    `-- default

The attributes folder is meant to contain a list of attributes that can be used within the recipes...