Chef Supermarket cookbooks with no metadata.rb file

Question

When installing / downloading cookbooks from Chef's Supermarket, some cookbooks do include a metadata.json file, however do not include a metadata.rb file.

Without the metadata.rb file a user is unable to upload the cookbook to the chef server. My question is two fold:

1. Is there a way to generate a proper metadata.rb file for the project if a downloaded / installed cookbook does not include one?
2. If there is a way to upload the cookbook to the chef server when there is no metadata.rb?

Here's the version of ChefDK running on my workstation:

1. Chef Development Kit Version: 1.3.43
2. chef-client version: 12.19.36
3. delivery version: master (dd319aa632c2f550c92a2172b9d1226478fea997)
4. berks version: 5.6.4
5. kitchen version: 1.16.0

Here's the commands and cookbook I'm using to get the cookbook from Supermarket:

1. knife cookbook site download jenkins
2. knife cookbook site install jenkins

URL: https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/jenkins#readme

Thanks for any help. I haven't been able to find much in Chef's documentation on working with cookbooks that do not have a metadata.rb file included. From what I've read, every cookbook should have a metadata.rb file located in each cookbook directory.

Answer 1

Okay, so this requires a bit of a history lesson to explain. In the early days everyone uploaded cookbooks to Supermarket (well, the Community Site at the time) manually, by using a web form and uploading a tarball. This sucked so we added an API and a CLI command knife cookbook site share. This command worked basically like knife cookbook upload, in that it was designed for the "chef-repo" monorepo style where all cookbooks lived in a single folder called "cookbooks/". As Berkshelf gained traction, more and more people moved to putting each cookbook in its own repo and working with them in isolation. This made using knife cookbook site share harder to use, so a new tool was written: stove. Stove tried to correct a bunch of the problems in knife cookbook site share, and one of those was the continual problem of dynamic metadata. Some fancy cookbooks use tools like thor-scmversion to manage cookbook metadata, meaning the metadata.rb has a line looking basically like version IO.read('VERSION'). There are other examples, but the short version is that if the metadata.rb contains dynamic code, you don't want to re-run that dynamic stuff after the release because it might not work on your machine (like if it uses some files or tools that only exist on the cookbook author's machine). At the time, the only way to force everything in the Chef world to not run the metadata.rb was to not include it in the upload, and to only include the compiled metadata.json instead.

And so here we are. knife cookbook site share usually uploads only the .rb and not the .json while stove does the reverse. We've now fixed things throughout the ecosystem to know that if both metadata.rb and metadata.json exist, prefer the JSON. The plan is to fix the uploaders to all upload both files, but for now we are stuck with the difference.

That said, you shouldn't actually need the metadata.rb for anything, you can upload to a Chef Server with only the JSON and both Berkshelf and the policy system will automate this for you.

Answer 2

1. All cookbooks must have a metadata.rb; they're easy enough to create. However, based on this bug report; metadata.json should also work. Also, as you can see by looking at the chef source; either should work.
2. No; this is because the file will include information such as the name, version, and dependencies. It's required, either as a .json or .rb.

There are options that you have when you run into cookbooks without metadata.json or metadata.rb:

• Report to the maintainer that its missing a critical component; and hope they fix it.
• Add the metadata.rb yourself.
• Find a cookbook that is working with similar functionality.

Are you getting errors from trying to upload this cookbook? It should be working.