Resolving and downloading chef cookbook dependencies

Question

Let's say I want to use a community cookbook (i.e. http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/gerrit). So I will download it using 'knife cookbook site download ' and upload to my local chef server. I need to repeat this step for every direct and transient dependency.

Is there a single command or tool to resolve/download all direct and transient dependencies of a cookbook?

Answer 1

Just to expand the answers here about using Berkshelf which is included in ChefDk. The pointer to using Bershelf is great but missing the how part so hopefully somebody might find this answer helpful.

Take for example the wordpress cookbook which has dependencies: https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/wordpress

In order to upload this to your chef-server, what you can do is create a Berksfile which Berkshelf will use as a configuration as to what Cookbooks to retrieve and where to get them. Just copy the one-liner from the Supermarket berkshelf section

chef-dev]$ cat Berksfile
source "https://supermarket.chef.io"

cookbook 'wordpress', '~> 3.0.0'

And then do a berks install

[chef-dev]$ berks install
Resolving cookbook dependencies...
Fetching cookbook index from https://supermarket.chef.io...
Installing 7-zip (1.0.2)
Installing apache2 (3.2.2)
Installing apt (2.9.2)
Installing bluepill (2.4.3)
Installing build-essential (2.4.0)
Installing chef-sugar (3.3.0)
Installing chef_handler (1.4.0)
Installing compat_resource (12.10.6)
Installing database (5.1.2)
Installing iis (4.1.10)
Installing mariadb (0.3.1)
Installing mysql (7.2.0)
Installing mysql2_chef_gem (1.0.1)
Installing nginx (2.7.6)
Installing ohai (2.1.0)
Installing openssl (4.4.0)
Installing packagecloud (0.2.4)
Installing php (1.9.0)
Installing php-fpm (0.6.10)
Installing postgresql (4.0.6)
Installing rbac (1.0.3)
Installing rsyslog (4.0.0)
Installing runit (1.7.8)
Installing selinux (0.9.0)
Installing smf (2.2.8)
Installing tar (0.7.0)
Installing windows (1.44.1)
Installing wordpress (3.0.0)
Installing xml (2.0.0)
Installing yum (3.11.0)
Installing yum-epel (0.7.0)
Installing yum-mysql-community (0.2.0)

Once the cookbooks are available locally, you can then upload the cookbook and its dependencies using berks upload. During the upload, it will also take care in resolving dependencies similar to download.

[chef-dev]$ berks upload

Also FYI, the cookbooks will be download and available in

~/.berkshelf/cookbooks/