Chef Generator Cookbook

Generator cookbook for creating new cookbooks using chef generate cookbook COOKBOOK_NAME --generator-cookbook. Checkout [test/desired_cookbook/](./test/desired_cookbook/) to see how a generated cookbook will look.

Usage

1. Download the cookbook available from Chef Supermarket
2. Generate a cookbook using chef generate cookbook ... from chef-dk, passing in the path to this generator-cookbook as an argument

# download the cookbook from the supermarket
curl -L https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/generator-cookbook/download | tar xz

# install `chef` utility from chef-dk if you don't already have it
which chef || gem install chef-dk --no-document

# generate your new cookbook using the generator repo as a template
chef generate cookbook COOKBOOK_NAME \
  --copyright 'Copyright Holder' \
  --email 'email@domain.com' \
  --license 'apachev2' \
  --generator-cookbook generator-cookbook

Differences from default generator

• Each generated file includes a simple code example to get you started in that file
• Test-kitchen and Chefspec Travis CI setup generated
• Gemfile generated
• This generator always uses Berkshelf rather than Policyfile
• There is no Chef Delivery support

Here is a comparison of the file trees created by this generator and the default chef-dk generator:

this_generator/                default_chef-dk_generator/
  .gitignore                     .gitignore
  .kitchen.docker.yml            .kitchen.yml
  .kitchen.yml                   Berksfile
  .rspec                         LICENSE
  .travis.sh                     README.md
  .travis.yml                    chefignore
  Berksfile                      metadata.rb
  Gemfile                        recipes/
  LICENSE                          default.rb
  README.md                      spec/
  attributes/                      spec_helper.rb
    default.rb                     unit/
  chefignore                         recipes/
  metadata.rb                          default_spec.rb
  recipes/                       test/
    default.rb                     integration/
  spec/                              default/
    recipes/                           default_test.rb
      default_spec.rb
    spec_helper.rb             7 directories, 11 files
  test/
    fixtures/
      cookbooks/
        fixture_cookbook/
          metadata.rb
          recipes/
            default.rb
    integration/
      default/
        default_spec.rb

11 directories, 19 files

Development

Generating with this cookbook is tested in Travis - a cookbook is generated and then compared to [test/desired_cookbook](./test/desired_cookbook/).

When developing the generator cookbook, its handy to run the generator and see if your changes work as you intended:

# clear generated_cookbook/ and generate into it
rm -rf generated_cookbook
bundle exec chef generate cookbook generated_cookbook \
  --copyright 'Copyright Holder' \
  --email 'email@domain.com' \
  --license 'apachev2' \
  --verbose \
  --generator-cookbook .

# compare the file trees of test/desired_cookbook/ and generated_cookbook/
mkdir -p tmp
tree -aF test/desired_cookbook > tmp/desired_cookbook.tree
tree -aF generated_cookbook > tmp/generated_cookbook.tree
git diff --no-index tmp/*.tree

# diff the contents of test/desired_cookbook/ and generated_cookbook/
git diff --no-index test/desired_cookbook generated_cookbook

Releasing

Ensure your local master branch is up to date with changes and metadata version increase. Then use stove to create and push a git tag and the push cookbook to the supermarket.

bundle exec stove --username atheiman --key ~/.chef/atheiman-chef.io.pem