FAQ

What do I do with my own cookbooks?

If you want to use librarian-chef when developing a cookbook inside your repository, you can do one of two things:

First Option: You can put your cookbook into your site-cookbooks directory, and make sure that knife knows about your site-cookbooks directory (by adding that in your .chef/knife.rb).

# .chef/knife.rb
# ... snip ...
require 'librarian/chef/integration/knife'
cookbook_path Librarian::Chef.install_path,
              File.expand_path('../../site-cookbooks', __FILE__)
# ... snip ...

If you do this, you should not add that cookbook to your Cheffile. Instead, you should make sure your cookbook has a correct metadata.rb and you should duplicate the dependencies and their constraints in your cookbook's metadata.rb into your Cheffile. For example, if your cookbook's metadata.rb declares depends "rabbitmq", then your Cheffile should declare cookbook "rabbitmq". Note that librarian-chef will not know about your cookbook at all. But that is OK, since it's really part of your repository and not an external cookbook, and librarian-chef is really for pulling in external cookbooks. This is the simpler approach.

Second Option: You can put your cookbook into a separate directory such as cookbooks-sources, which knife does not know about, and add the cookbook to your Cheffile with the :path => source:

cookbook "my-wonderful-cookbook",
         :path => 'cookbooks-sources'

If you do this, you should make sure that this directory is not added to your .chef/knife.rb. The reason is that this technique treats your cookbook as an external cookbook which librarian-chef should pull in every time you run librarian-chef install. Note that every time you change your cookbook, you will need to re-run librarian-chef install to have librarian-chef install that cookbook into your cookbooks directory before uploading the cookbook to the chef-server.

Akin to this technique, you can put your cookbook into a separate git repository and use the :git => source in your Cheffile. You will need to run librarian-chef update my-wonderful-cookbook whenever you push to your cookbook external git repository.

Whether you put your cookbook in a separate path or in an external git repository, be sure to declare all of your cookbook's dependencies in your cookbook's metadata.rb so that librarian-chef can read them and pull down all the cookbooks that your cookbook depends on. If your cookbook depends on another cookbook which is found in a git repository but not on the Opscode Community Site, be sure to add an entry for that depended-on cookbook, with the source to pull it from, to your Cheffile so that librarian-chef knows where to get that depended-on cookbook.