How to use hand-written cookbooks when using berkshelf in chef?

Question

I'm using vagrant+chef. My chef cookbooks worked perfectly. Then I installed vagrant-berkshelf plugin and from that moment I could not use own cookbooks. Berkshelf overrides cookbooks directory and chef does not see my cookbooks when I use them. My config is like this:

config.berkshelf.enabled = true

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
   chef.add_recipe "qbaka-frontend"
end

With this configuration chef works only with cookbooks specified in Berksfile but can't see my cookbooks in cookbooks directory.

How can I work simultaneously with my & Berkshelf's cookbooks?

Answer 1

The vagrant-berkshelf plugin and Berkshelf in general is very cookbook-centric. Chef, however, is cookbook-repo centric. Installing the vagrant-berkshelf plugin encourages you to use the cookbook-centric approach, treating each cookbook like its own software project.

You need to add each of the cookbooks in your cookbooks directory to your Berksfile. There are a couple of approaches here:

1. If you only need one or two cookbooks, just add them using the Berkshelf path location:

   cookbook 'bacon', path: '~/cookbooks/bacon'
   

2. If you want all your cookbooks, you can leverage Ruby here. A little-known secret is that the Berksfile is executed as Ruby, so you can loop and be magical:

   Dir['/Users/sethvargo/cookbooks/**'].each do |path|
     cookbook File.basename(path), path: path
   end
   

   That will load each cookbook in that directory into your Berksfile (and thus Berkshelf)

Sources:

• I'm a core committer to the Berkshelf project
• I worked for Chef at the time of this post :)