Understanding the chef cookbook’s README file

Problems Area –

Our infrastructure has many cookbooks that aim to be reusable, primarily through encapsulating behaviour in LWRPs. This led to an explosion of LWRPs and sometimes the documentation didn’t keep up or did just not exist.

Solution 1: Follow Best Practices 

This command will create a README.rdoc by default, and I prefer Markdown, so I specify the -r md option.

> knife cookbook create smartmontools -r md

Solution 2: Automate using plugins

README.md which should be generated automatcially must contain information about the recipes, attributes, platform compatibility and cookbook requirements (i.e. depends, recommends, suggests etc).

Mathias Lafeldt wrote a knife plugin that generates an initial README.md from the metadata.rb file in a a cookbook.

Link –

• https://github.com/mlafeldt/knife-cookbook-readme
• http://mlafeldt.github.io/knife-cookbook-readme/

Extension of Mathias Lafeldt was done here with regenerate README.md from the cookbook source code

• https://github.com/realityforge/knife-cookbook-doc

Please refer these useful blogs as well which is referenced in order to write this article…

• http://realityforge.org/code/2013/04/01/documenting-cookbooks.html

Rajesh Kumar

I’m a DevOps/SRE/DevSecOps/Cloud Expert passionate about sharing knowledge and experiences. I have worked at Cotocus. I share tech blog at DevOps School, travel stories at Holiday Landmark, stock market tips at Stocks Mantra, health and fitness guidance at My Medic Plus, product reviews at TrueReviewNow , and SEO strategies at Wizbrand.

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