knife-api Chef Tool

A small library that lets you drive Chef's `knife` programmatically

Install & Usage Instructions

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'knife-api'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install knife-api

Usage

The main feature of this library is the ability to drive knife as a method call
as opposed to an individual program. This has a number of benefits:

• It's a lot faster
• You can capture output
• You're relying on code that has a contract to maintain compatible with Chef
• Use knife plugins all you want without breaking your workflow
• Optionally, Chef becomes constrained by a gemfile (as do the plugins you use) and that constraint remains consistent.

It provides two calls, knife and knife_capture that are injected into the
top-level namespace automatically. Additionally, if you are using rake, it
will detect this and make it available to rake's DSL as well.

If you wish to use this code elsewhere, just include Chef::Knife::API into
your classes/modules.

Both commands take two argument-passing styles. Both use an array of strings to
represent the ARGV passed to knife, but there is additionally a shorthand to
make the actual subcommand stand out: if you supply a symbol or string with
underscore-delimited subcommand names, it will automatically convert this for
you. This allows you to visually distinguish a command from its arguments.

knife-api allows the use of alternative Chef Configs via the CHEF_CONFIG
environment variable.