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Chef Cookbook Generator

Template for creating new cookbooks with chef generate cookbook COOKBOOK_NAME --generator-cookbook:

# install `chef` utility from chef-dk if you dont already have it
gem install --no-document chef-dk

# download the generator repo
curl --location \
     --silent \
     'https://github.com/atheiman/chef-cookbook-generator/archive/master.tar.gz' \
     | tar xz

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

Checkout desired_cookbook/ to see how a generated cookbook will look.

Differences from default generator

• Each generated file includes commented code to get you started
• Test-kitchen and Chefspec Travis CI setup generated
• Gemfile generated

Notes

• This generator uses Berkshelf rather than Policyfile

Testing / Development

Generating with this cookbook is tested in Travis - a cookbook is generated and then compared to 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 ./generator_cookbook

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

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

To Do

• override / monkey patch post create message