Summary

This chapter introduced you to the critical components of a cookbook that are used to write recipes. It also showed you some example recipes to get you started; there are a number of advanced actions that can be accomplished in your recipes, such as searching the Chef server for data, loading data from data bags, or using encrypted data. Additionally, you can add more components to your cookbooks such as custom resources and providers, tests, and arbitrary Ruby libraries. All of these will be discussed in detail in later chapters, but first let's take a look at writing some complete cookbooks. We'll then learn how to test them before we move on to looking at some cookbooks for common system administration tasks, and then we'll progress on to advanced topics.