Installing software from source
If you need to install a piece of software that is not available as a package for your platform, you will need to compile it yourself.
In Chef, you can easily do this by using the script
resource. What is more challenging is to make such a script
resource idempotent.
In the following recipe, we will see how to do both.
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.
Retrieve the required cookbooks:
Add them to your
Berksfile
:mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
source 'https://supermarket.getchef.com' cookbook 'apt' cookbook 'build-essential'
Install it on your local workstation:
mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ berks install
Resolving cookbook dependencies... Fetching cookbook index from https://supermarket.getchef.com... Installing build-essential (2.1.3) Installing apt (2.6.1)
Upload it to your Chef...