Overview

Every Chef installation needs a Chef Repository. This is the place where cookbooks, roles, config files and other artifacts for managing systems with Chef will live. We strongly recommend storing this repository in a version control system such as Git and treat it like source code.

While we prefer Git, and make this repository available via GitHub, you are welcome to download a tar or zip archive and use your favorite version control system to manage the code.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/fnichol/chef-repo.git /var/chef-solo
(cd /var/chef-solo && git submodule init && git submodule update)

Repository Directories

This repository contains several directories, and each directory contains a README file that describes what it is for in greater detail, and how to use it for managing your systems with Chef.

config/ - Contains the Rake configuration file, rake.rb.
cookbooks/ - Cookbooks you download or create.

Rake Tasks

The repository contains a Rakefile that includes tasks that are installed with the Chef libraries. To view the tasks available with in the repository with a brief description, run rake -T.

The default task (default) is run when executing rake with no arguments. It will call the task test_cookbooks.

The following tasks are not directly replaced by knife sub-commands.

bundle_cookbook[cookbook] - Creates cookbook tarballs in the pkgs/ dir.
install - Calls update, roles and upload_cookbooks Rake tasks.
ssl_cert - Create self-signed SSL certificates in certificates/ dir.
update - Update the repository from source control server, understands git and svn.

The following tasks duplicate functionality from knife and may be removed in a future version of Chef.

metadata - replaced by knife cookbook metadata -a.
new_cookbook - replaced by knife cookbook create.
role[role_name] - replaced by knife role from file.
roles - iterates over the roles and uploads with knife role from file.
test_cookbooks - replaced by knife cookbook test -a.
test_cookbook[cookbook] - replaced by knife cookbook test COOKBOOK.
upload_cookbooks - replaced by knife cookbook upload -a.
upload_cookbook[cookbook] - replaced by knife cookbook upload COOKBOOK.