You must first have the capability to interact with the site, following which you'll be able to access, download, use and contribute to the community cookbooks.

Interaction with the Community Site

Opscode has Single Sign-On for the Community Site and for Hosted Chef - so if you have an account for one, then you have an account for both. You'll need to be logged in if you already have an account. If you don't have an account - sign up, it's free!

Resetting the Password to the Community Site

There are two ways to reset the password, depending on if you are able to log in with your current password or not.

Changing your password with your current password

1. On the homepage of the Opscode cookbooks site, click your username in the upper right corner next to Logged in as.
2. On the page showing your user details, click the change my password link, as shown below:
   
3. Enter your current password, new password, and confirm your new password, and then click the "Change Password" button.
   Note that password needs to be 6 to 50 characters long.

Changing your password without your current password

If you forget your current password, you can change your password without using the current password.

You will need to know your Opscode user name's email address so that you can get an email to reset your password.

1. On the homepage of the Opscode cookbooks site (http://cookbooks.opscode.com), click the Recover Password link in the upper right corner.
2. On the Recover Your Password page, enter the Email Address that you used to register with Opscode, and click the Submit button.
   You will receive an email with a link to reset your password.

Editing your Profile

Your Opscode user account is shared across the Opscode Platform, cookbooks.opscode.com, and help.opscode.com. You can update your name, twitter account information, geographic information, email address, profile image, and communication preferences.

1. On the homepage of the Opscode cookbooks site (http://cookbooks.opscode.com), click your username in the right upper corner.
2. On the page showing your user's details, click the Edit Profile button, as shown below:
   
3. On the Edit Your Profile page,
4. Update your information, and
5. Click the Save Changes button.
   First Name, Last Name, and Email Address are required fields.

Use of the Community Site

Once you have the capability to interact on the site, you can search for and review cookbooks of interest, access and download those that you may potentially use for managing your infrastructure, follow cookbooks to be notified of any changes, upload your own cookbooks to the site to share with the community.

Following Cookbooks on the Community Site

Users can follow cookbooks to be updated via email when the cookbooks are updated. In order to find the cookbook you wish to follow, you can either search or browse the categories. Both the search box and the categories are on the homepage of the Cookbook Site (http://cookbooks.opscode.com). The search box can also be found in the right upper corner of other pages.

When you are on a particular cookbook's page,

1. The option to follow the cookbook is available on the right side of the page.
2. Click the gray Follow button right under the Download Now button to follow the cookbook.
3. Once followed, clicking again allows you to unfollow it.

When you follow a cookbook, you will receive email notifications when new versions of the cookbook are uploaded, if you have chosen to receive email notifications from Opscode. The list of cookbooks you are following is found in your user profile: accessed by clicking your username in the right upper corner after logging in.

Access and Download Cookbooks from the Cookbook Site

You can download and search for Cookbooks from the web site without logging in, but all of the rest operations (sharing, contributing, or using the REST API) require you to log in with an Opscode user account, which can be registered for free on the Cookbook Site.

There are two ways to download and install a cookbook from the Cookbook Site:

• Download a cookbook from cookbooks.opscode.com, place it in your chef repository's cookbook directory and untar the file to use it. For example, if you downloaded the apache2 cookbook you could run the following to untar it:

  The cookbook will uncompress and be ready to be uploaded to Hosted Chef or the Chef Server. You can delete the tar.gz file once the command completes.

• You can also use knife to install cookbooks. This command would download the apache2.tar.gz file to the cookbook directory, untar it, and remove the tar file afterwards for you:

  Once this command completes the cookbook is ready to be uploaded to Hosted Chef or the Chef Server.

Authors of the Cookbooks on the Cookbook Site

There are cookbooks provided and maintained by Opscode, while others are contributed by members of the Chef Community. If you have a cookbook downloaded and need to know who created it, you can find this at the bottom of the README.rdoc. This is located at `~/chef-repo/cookbooks/<cookbook name>/README.rdoc`.

This information is also available on the cookbook site, once you click on a cookbook the collaborators and maintainers are listed on the right-hand side of the page.

Creating and Installing Cookbooks

Each of these activities are sufficiently detailed to have the information on their own pages.

• Details on creating cookbooks can be found at Guide to Creating A Cookbook and Writing A Recipe.
• Managing Cookbooks With Knife has detail on use of the Knife command line interface to manage your cookbooks, including the installation

Adding a Cookbook to the Community Site

There are two ways to add a cookbook to the community site, you can either use knife or upload the tarball through the website.

Uploading a cookbook using Knife

share

Use of Knife's share subcommand uploads the specified cookbook using the given category to the Opscode cookbooks site. This requires a login user and certificate for the Opscode Community site.

By default, knife will use the username and API key you've configured in your configuration file; otherwise you must explicitly set these values on the command line or use an alternate configuration file. You need to be the owner or maintainer of the cookbook if it already exists on the web site.

Usage:

For example:

unshare

Use of the unshare subcommand stops sharing the given cookbook on the Opscode cookbooks site.

Usage:

Uploading a cookbook using the web site

An alternate to using Knife is to upload the cookbook directly through the site.

Prepare the Cookbook

First, you should ensure that your cookbook's metadata.rb file is correct. You must include the following metadata:

• Name
• Version
• License

We also strongly recommend that you fill out:

• Description
• Supported Platforms

Once you have done that, you need to bundle the cookbook into a tarball. New versions of the Chef Repository have a task called 'bundle_cookbook' which will do this for you. From the top of your Chef Repository:

The task will produce a tarball in the pkgs directory of your chef repository:

Add the cookbook to the Cookbook Site

To add a new cookbook to the Cookbook Site:

1. Visit http://cookbooks.opscode.com and log in.
2. Click on the 'Cookbooks' tab at the top.
3. Click the orange Add a new cookbook button.
4. On the "New cookbook" page, browse for your cookbook tarball, select a category, enter tags (separated by commas), and click Create.

Licensing Questions

Do I need to license my cookbooks with Apache 2.0, like Opscode uses for Chef?

A: No. You can use any license you wish for your cookbooks as long as you have the rights to share and publish them. You specify which license the cookbook is published under in the metadata of the cookbook itself.

Do I need to sign an Opscode Contributor License Agreement to post cookbooks?

A: No. The Opscode CLA is only required if you want to make contributions to Opscode's published cookbooks.

Maintaining the Cookbooks you have Added

If you uploaded a cookbook to the Opscode Cookbook Site, you are the maintainer of the cookbook. A maintainer can delete or deprecate the cookbook, edit the metadata of the cookbook, and add collaborators. In order to do any of these tasks, you need to log in to the Opscode Cookbook Site and navigate to the cookbook you uploaded. You will see a menu bar with the following options:

Deleting the cookbook

Click the Delete cookbook link and confirm the operation. 
Note: It's generally a better idea to deprecate a cookbook than to delete a cookbook, since other users may rely on that cookbook and will want to know what to use instead.

Deprecating the cookbook

Click the Deprecate cookbook link and enter the name of another cookbook that you would like to direct users to use instead. This cookbook can be maintained by another user entirely. However, it needs to have been uploaded before deprecating the old one.

Adding a collaborator to the cookbook

A collaborator can upload new versions of the cookbook. In order to add a collaborator to the cookbook, click the Add a collaborator link and enter the username you want to add.

Promoting collaborators to maintainers

A maintainer can promote collaborators to become maintainers by clicking the promote link under the collaborator. There can only be one maintainer on the cookbook. Think of maintainers as the admin for the cookbook; they can remove everyone else as collaborators, so be careful who you promote.

Uploading a new version of the cookbook

Click the Upload a new version link on the menu bar to upload a new version of the cookbook. 
Both maintainers and collaborators can do this.

Editing the metadata of a cookbook

1. Click Edit Cookbook button on the menu bar.
2. Enter new information (metadata) about the cookbook.

Version Constraints

Chef Repository