Managing applications with Habitat

Habitat enables you to package your application and your configuration in a way that you can use the same package on your local development machine up to your production servers. All you need to change are some well-defined configuration parameters. Let's see how to install Habitat and use a pre-defined Habitat package.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook named my_cookbook and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks recipe in Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure.

Create your Berksfile in your Chef repository including my_cookbook:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
cookbook 'my_cookbook', path: './cookbooks/my_cookbook'

How to do it...

Let's run and configure nginx using Habitat:

1. Add the dependency on the habitat cookbook to your cookbook's metadata.rb:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/metadata.rb
   depends "habitat","~>0.2.0"
   

2. Install the dependent cookbooks:

   mma@laptop...