{"id":39349,"date":"2016-08-25T10:36:01","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T05:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=39349"},"modified":"2016-08-25T12:16:31","modified_gmt":"2016-08-25T06:46:31","slug":"introduction-to-berkshelf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/introduction-to-berkshelf\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to Berkshelf"},"content":{"rendered":"

People working with <\/a><\/span>Chef<\/span><\/a> Configuration Management tool know how Chef has significantly improved their ways of building servers quickly and reliably using cookbooks rather than using a\u00a0number of scripts on a single or sometimes on multiple machines. \u00a0<\/span>Recipes which are nested under cookbooks, are an integral part of Chef and helps in\u00a0defining the way a particular Infrastructure code will be built. Once these cookbooks become\u00a0large and highly interdependent, it becomes necessary to manage these cookbooks itself. Berkshelf is the tool which makes \u2018the management\u2019 & dependency management between cookbooks easy.<\/p>\n

\"chef\"\u00a0\"berkshelf\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s first talk about how a cookbook is used in Chef<\/a>, for example, Nginx. Cookbooks are fed into the Chef-Client or Chef-Solo. It contains how to configure your application or service on your server. Recipes which are the components of the application\/service goes inside the cookbooks. These recipes contain\u00a0Resource Collections which are like files, package, services, repositories, etc.<\/p>\n

\"Cookbook-flow\"<\/p>\n

LWRPs have made it easy for us to create Chef recipes using a minimal amount of code since the major work of writing the Resource, and Provider is already done. However working with these recipes\/cookbooks can become a mess when there is a\u00a0lack of proper management tool on it. Yes, management tool on the top of management tool!<\/p>\n

The idea behind Berkshelf is: Do not put cookbooks in a Chef repository and instead treat them like their own piece of software or project, things will become better. The goal of Berkshelf is to manage a cookbook outside of Chef repository in isolation. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Berkshelf is a Command Line tool which can act as a source code management tool or a package manager like gem, apt, yum, etc. It replaces portions of <\/span>knife<\/span><\/a> like generating, uploading & downloading Cookbooks.<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Installing Berkshelf<\/span><\/h2>\n

You will need Ruby installed on your system. Also, Berkshelf comes integrated with Chefdk, so installing <\/span>Chefdk<\/span><\/a> will automatically give you berks installed:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"chef_dk_install\"<\/p>\n

Berksfile<\/h2>\n

Berksfile is the most crucial component of Berkshelf! It\u2019s just like metadata for Chef. However, the usage is somewhat different. Berksfile makes it simple to download a dependency cookbook from <\/span>chef supermarket<\/span><\/a> (or other places) and upload to the cookbook repository on the server. Here is the usual content inside it:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"berksfile\"\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

It involves mainly three settings:<\/span><\/p>\n