Installing gems with Chef is relatively painless. Most of the time, you can use the gem_package resource, which behaves very similarly to the native package resource: gem_package 'httparty' You can even specify the gem version to install: gem_package 'httparty'...

As the cookbook wrapper pattern becomes more prevalent, you may find it necessary to alter a parameter of a Chef resource in the library cookbook. For example, you may need to update the cookbook from where a file should be found, execute an action before a ser...

The Berksfile is really one of the most magical compontents of Berkshelf - a cookbook dependency manager for Chef. As a core team member, I sometimes take for granted the extensibility of Berkshelf, so I decided to blog about some patterns! Because the Berksfil...

Amazon Opsworks supplies its users with a nice collection of starter cookbooks on GitHub. Berkshelf prefers users treat each cookbook as its own software project, but for Opsworks users, that is not an option. Let me demonstrate a few ways you can use Berkshelf...

A few months ago, I was having a discussion with some colleagues internally and CHEF-494 came up. In short, the ticket was created by Seth Chisamore and proposed creating a core cookbook that included some useful primitives for common patterns:

Okay, now that I'm done ranting about how to Unit test, let's move onto Chef. I spoke at Chef Summit a few months ago and received a lot of questions about ChefSpec. It's very difficult to demonstrate the value in a Unit test when everyone is thinking at a high...