Issue with Berkshelf
If you work with Berkshelf, you might meet such scenario:
we update the upstream base cookbook, but would like to test with the downstream wrapper cookbook at the same time. But, the base cookbook is still under development, we don’t want to upload to the chef server until it’s verified. And, the wrapper cookbook is supposed to require some specific version of base cookbook from chef server. But, we can’t tell if all these will work, unless we bundle the base cookbook with the wrapper cookbook and test.
How to deal with that?
By default, berkshelf looks for cookbook from server, with source keyword, like below
source "https://supermarket.chef.io"
source :chef_server
We can utilize the Cookbook Keyword from Berksfile, here, which takes syntax like, cookbook "NAME" [, "VERSION_CONSTRAINT"] [, SOURCE_OPTIONS] and deliberately source or require local base cookbook with:
cookbook('base-cookbook', path: File.expand_path('../base-cookbook', __dir__))
if we run berks again, we will see it’s sourcing from ../base-cookbook now. looks good.
#=> /opt/chefdk/bin/berks
Resolving cookbook dependencies...
Fetching 'base-cookbook' from source at ../base-cookbook
Direct dependency vs. Indirect dependency
In fact, it will only work with direct dependency.
For example:
B depends on A
A depends on C
D depends on C
B depends on D
A/B wants to source local version of C
D want to source ~> 3.0 of C
It will cause conflicting dependencies, as D require (C ~> 3.0) but A/B require (c = 0.0.0),(local cookbook, has no version)
In that case, we could do some trick to make D believe it’s sourcing C ~> 3.0.
Looking into the metadata.rb of C, we can see:
version IO.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'VERSION')) rescue '0.0.1'
we can trick it into something like below since it’s only for test temporily
version '3.2.2' #IO.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'VERSION')) rescue '0.0.1'
Run berks again, we got:
/opt/chefdk/bin/berks
Resolving cookbook dependencies...
Fetching 'base-cookbook' from source at ../base-cookbook
.....
Fetching cookbook index from chef_server: https://chef.example.com/organizations/org...
.....
.....
Using base-cookbook (3.2.2) from source at ../base-cookbook
So, D recognizes ../base-cookbook as base-cookbook (3.2.2), it works !