Cookbooks

Cookbooks are a collection of recipes and they consist of basic and fundamental units of various policies and distributions. Each cookbook contains complete setups to install every distribution on a machine.

For instance, we need a web server, so we are installing Nginx to act as a web server. The Nginx cookbook should contain all the package names that are dependent to install Nginx. Moreover, it should provide step-by-step instructions to the machine to make this happen.

Let's have a detailed look at how to develop a cookbook.

The folder structure

Cookbooks should ideally consist of the following folder structure. As they are a collection of different recipes, while executing the recipe by default, Chef-Solo will look for a default folder:

attributes
    default.rb
files
    default
        file.txt
recipes
    default.rb
templates
    default
        file.erb
metadata.rb

Attributes

As we have already discussed about these terminologies in the last chapter here, once again, we...