Supermarket is the Chef community’s central clearing house for sharing cookbooks, tools, and plugins. It is a place for Chef community members to download community cookbooks, collaborate on cookbooks, and upload cookbooks to be used by other community members. It is also the place to share information about tools that improve Chef’s ecosystem. The Supermarket makes it easier to start participating in Chef’s open source projects by allowing individuals and corporations to sign and manage their Contributor License Agreements (CLA’s). Check out the Supermarket Announcement Blog Post for more information.
There are two versions of Supermarket available today.
This is available at the Chef Supermarket site. This is an open source project, you can find and contribute to the repo on GitHub.
There is also a version of Supermarket that can be run privately in your own infrastructure. This guide will not cover the private version of Supermarket, but many of the same principles will apply. Stay tuned for a Private Supermarket guide!
There are a few things you will need to work with Supermarket.
You will need Knife to interact with the Supermarket.
The easiest way to get Knife (along with many other tools needed to use both Supermarket and Chef) is through the Chef Development Kit.
Make sure you have a knife.rb config file setup.
This guide will take you through the basics of using Knife and Supermarket. For more information on the various commands and options, please see the full Knife cookbook site documentation.
You can now take several actions to browse the community cookbooks available on the Supermarket site.
To see a list of all community cookbooks available from Supermarket, run the following:
$ knife cookbook site list
This will return lots of output similar to:
1password minecraft 301 mineos 7-zip minidlna AWS_see_spots_run minitest AmazonEC2Tag minitest-handler Appfirst-Cookbook mirage CVE-2014-3566-poodle mlocate CVE-2015-0235 mod_security Obfsproxy mod_security2 R modcloth-hubot Rstats modcloth-nad SysinternalsBginfo modman VRTSralus modules abiquo mogilefs acadock mongodb accel-ppp mongodb-10gen accounts mongodb-agents accumulator monit [etc]
Looking for a particular cookbook? The most downloaded cookbook as of February 2015 is the mysql cookbook. If I wanted to search for this cookbook I would use a command similar to this:
$ knife cookbook site search mysql
Which will return output similar to this:
mysql:
cookbook: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql
cookbook_description: Provides mysql_service, mysql_config, and mysql_client resources
cookbook_maintainer: chef
cookbook_name: mysql
mysql-apt-config:
cookbook: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql-apt-config
cookbook_description: Installs/Configures mysql-apt-config
cookbook_maintainer: tata
cookbook_name: mysql-apt-config
mysql-multi:
cookbook: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql-multi
cookbook_description: MySQL replication wrapper cookbook
cookbook_maintainer: rackops
cookbook_name: mysql-multi
Let’s take a closer look at that first mysql cookbook.
To view more information about a particular cookbook, run the following:
$ knife cookbook site show mysql
Which will return input similar to this:
average_rating:
category: Other
created_at: 2009-10-28T19:16:54.000Z
deprecated: false
description: Provides mysql_service, mysql_config, and mysql_client resources
external_url: http://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/mysql
foodcritic_failure: true
issues_url:
latest_version: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql/versions/6.0.15
maintainer: chef
metrics:
downloads:
total: 79275449
versions:
0.10.0: 927561
0.15.0: 927536
0.20.0: 927321
0.21.0: 927298
0.21.1: 927311
0.21.2: 927424
0.21.3: 927441
0.21.5: 927326
0.22.0: 927297
0.23.0: 927353
0.23.1: 927862
0.24.0: 927316
If you want to take a look at a specific version of a cookbook, include it in the command like this:
$ knife cookbook site show mysql 0.10.0
Which will return output similar to:
average_rating: cookbook: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql file: http://cookbooks.opscode.com/api/v1/cookbooks/mysql/versions/0.10.0/download license: Apache 2.0 tarball_file_size: 7010 version: 0.10.0
Ready to downlad and install a cookbook from the community site?
To download a cookbook as a tar.gz archive and place it in the current working directory, use the download command.
$ knife cookbook site download mysql
Installing a cookbook is similar to downloading it, but rather than saving the cookbook as a tar.gz, it extracts the cookbook and sets up a git branch so you can keep it up to date with the original cookbook. See this Stack Overflow for an excellent explanation.
It also resolves dependencies and creates a new branch for each of the dependent cookbooks.
$ knife cookbook site install mysql
NOTE: If you receive the error “ERROR: IOError: Cannot open or read /Users/nshamrell/chef-repo/cookbooks/mysql/metadata.rb”, check which version of knife you are using with:
$ knife -v
If it is lower than Chef: 12.0.2, you will need to update your version of Knife. However, if you are using Chef DK and rvm, try running this command:
$ rvm use system
Then retry
$ knife cookbook site install mysql
Now let’s upload a cookbook to the Supermarket. If you have a cookbook of your own you would like to use, please do! If you’d like some guidance in creating a very basic cookbook of you own to practice uploading to the Supermarket, see the “Create Cookbook” section of this section of the Supermarket Docs.
There are a few things you’ll need in place before you can upload your cookbook to the Supermarket.
First, take a look at your knife.rb configuration file. Mine lives at .chef/knife.rb.
You will need to have lines similar to this in the config file. If you don’t already have them, please add them in.
node_name "nellshamrell" # Replace with the login name you use to login to the Supermarket.
client_key "#{ENV['HOME']}/.chef/client.pem" # Define the path to wherever your client.pem file lives. This is the key you generated when you signed up for a Chef account.
cookbook_path [ '/Users/nshamrell/Projects/my_chef_repo/cookbooks' ] # Directory where the cookbook you're uploading resides.
We also recommend that you add both a source_url' and 'issues_url' in your cookbooks metadata. Then, when your cookbook appears on Supermarket, it will also display a link to your cookbook’s source (i.e. a GitHub repo) and issues (i.e. GitHub issues for your repo).
Then use this command to upload the cookbook to the Supermarket!
$ knife cookbook site share "my_apache2_cookbook" "Web Servers"
Notice that I defined the Supermarket category my cookbook should be in – in this case, “Web Servers”. Other categories you can use are “Databases”, “Process Management”, “Monitoring & Trending”, “Programming Languages”, “Package Management”, “Applications”, “Networking”, “Operating Systems & Virtualization”, “Utilities”, or “Other”.
Stove is an alternate tool for sharing cookbooks. For more information, please see the project GitHub page.
Should you ever need to unshare a cookbook from the Supermarket, you can use the “unshare” command to do so.
$ knife cookbook site unshare my_apache2_cookbook
This will remove your cookbook from the Supermarket site.
If you receive an error which looks like this:
ERROR: Invalid Redirect: DELETE request was redirected from https://supermarket.getchef.com/api/v1/cookbooks/my\_apache2\_cookbook to https://supermarket.chef.io/api/v1/cookbooks/my\_apache2\_cookbook. Only GET and HEAD support redirects. Change your server location in knife.rb to the server's FQDN to avoid unwanted redirections.
You need to upgrade your Chef version to 12.1.1 or higher. Visit the Chef Client Download Site to download and install it for your operating system.
For more information, check out the Supermarket docs.
And there you have it, the basics of using Chef Supermarket! Happy cooking!