Cleaning up old files

What happens if you want to remove a software package from your node? You should be aware that Chef does not undo its changes. Removing a resource from your cookbook does not mean that Chef will remove the resource from your nodes. You need to do this by yourself.

Tip

In today's infrastructure, it's far better to replace a node than try to clean things up with Chef.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook called 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.

Make sure that you have a remote_directory resource in my_cookbook, as described in the Distributing directory trees recipe.

How to do it…

Let's remove the remote_directory resource from my_cookbook and see what happens:

1. Edit your cookbook's default recipe and remove the remote_directory resource:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb
   # there used to be the remote_directory...