Managing external Chef cookbooks and Puppet modules

Up till now, we've written our own cookbooks, which are fairly simple in their current state. Chances are, we'll expect a lot more complicated setups in our real life infrastructure. To help us, there're two kinds of external cookbooks we can use: community-backed cookbooks and official cookbooks, written and maintained by the Chef team directly. To browse available cookbooks, navigate to the Chef Supermarket (think of it as a store for cookbooks): https://supermarket.chef.io/.

The thing is, our life will become increasingly complicated with all those cookbooks downloaded here and there, each of them having dependencies of their own. Fortunately, the Chef DK ships with a superb utility for this use case—Berkshelf.

Berkshelf allows us to declare cookbook dependencies, versions and locations in a single file, and in a single command, upload everything needed to run our cookbook.

In this section, we'll migrate away from our distribution's MariaDB...