Standarized cookbook templating and naming conventions for chef

Based on Alessandro Franceschi / Lab42 idea for Puppet modules templating and Jorge Espada's tmux cookbook.

This repository contains various experiments on Chef cookbooks design.

Alternative solutions are researched and published to provide basic sample cookbooks that can be used as blueprint for the (quick) generation of new basic cookbooks of different nature, upon which the relevant customizations can be done.

A set of common attributes (and possibly community standard) greatly enhances cookbooks usability and interoperability. These cookbooks templates implement an early proposal for a Standard Cookbook Interface: a set of common and standard attributes that provide standard and predictable functionalities.

I personally think that something like this would be of great benefit for the Chef Modules ecosystem.

All these cookbooks feature some common principles:

• True reusability: you can completely manage the behaviour of the cookbook via the attributes it exposes.

• Easy Multi OS support implementation: all internal references to paths are abtracted when possible.

• Configuration freedom: you can provide configuration files, attributes and whole dirs in the way you want.

• Behaviour management: you can define how the cookbook's resources behave.

• Decommissioning support: All the resources can be installed and removed.

COMMON TOOLS CONFIGURED IN THE GENERATED SCAFFOLD

All these templates create scaffolds ready to start development, with the following tools configured:

• Berkshelf: For cookbook dependencies management and development.
• Rubocop: for linting.
• Foodcritic: to write cookbooks following best/recommended practices.
• Chefspec: default specs are provided, with descriptive tests for the expected basic behaviour. You can run:

rake spec

in the directory of the created template, to check them.

• Serverspec: to test your cookbook on the server side.
• Kitchen-CI: configured to use chef_zero on the following default vms:
  • opscode-debian-7.4
  • opscode-ubuntu-14.04
  • opscode-centos-6.5
  • opscode-centos-5.10
• Vagrant: to do testings on the mentioned Virtualbox VMs.

TEMPLATES TYPES

Following the proposed cookbook types from (FIXME!), there are a few templates to choose from:

pack_conf

Tthis template creates a cookbook to manage a package and its configuration files and directories. Useful for packages that don't have a daemon or service (ie vim, mc, etc.)

pack_conf_serv

This template creates a cookbook to manage an application, its configuration files and directories and the service/daemon it provides. Typical examples are apache, ftpd, etc.

USAGE

1. Clone this repo

2. Chosee the template more suitable for the cookbook you want to create. (Check under the templates directory).

3. Run

./cookbook_clone.sh -t pack_conf -n vim

4. Change to the newly created directory:

cd vim-cookbook

5. Modify as you please :)

Obviously, there's a lot of room for improvement. These templates don't attempt to cover all the cookbooks you might need to write and just expect to make it easier to start writing a cookbook.

Feel free to send me any comments, patches, suggestions or ideas. They will be very welcome.