Cookbooks

A cookbook is the fundamental unit of work in Chef. They are how you encapsulate all the different resources you need to automate your infrastructure, and they are the component that is easily sharable between different Chef users.

What's in a Cookbook

Cookbooks contain 5 different components:

Attributes allow you to set attributes and recipes on the Node.
Definitions allow you to create new Resources by composing them of existing Resources.
Files are where you put any files you wish to transfer via Resources#Remote File
Libraries allow you to extend the Chef language with arbitrary Ruby code.
Recipes allow you to specify Resources to manage, in the order they should be managed.
Templates are where you store any ERB templates utilized via Resources#Template

How do I create a new Cookbook

See the Your Chef Repository page for details.

Table of Contents

What's in a Cookbook
How do I create a new Cookbook
Where can I find some pre-made Cookbooks?

Where can I find some pre-made Cookbooks?

We're working on a solution to this (a site that will let you share not only your Chef cookbooks, but your Puppet recipes, Capistrano scripts, and anything else that's infrastructure management related). For now, you can check out these places:

Repository	Description	Maintainer
http://github.com/opscode/chef-repo	Recipes created by Opscode	Opscode