Flagging problems in your Chef cookbooks

Writing solid Chef recipes can be quite challenging. There are a couple of pitfalls, which you can easily overlook. Also, writing cookbooks in a consistent style is even harder. You might wonder what the proven ways to write cookbooks are. Foodcritic tries to identify possible issues with the logic and style of your cookbooks.

In this section, you'll learn how to use Foodcritic on some existing cookbooks.

Getting ready

Install the mysql cookbook by running the following code:

mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ knife cookbook site install mysql 6.0.0

Installing mysql to /Users/mma/work/chef-repo/cookbooks
…TRUNCATED OUTPUT…
Cookbook mysql version 6.0.0 successfully installed

How to do it...

Let's see how Foodcritic reports findings:

1. Run foodcritic on your cookbook:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ foodcritic ./cookbooks/my
   sql
   

   ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT...
   FC001: Use strings in preference to symbols to access node attributes: ./cookbooks/mysql/libraries/helpers...