Manage Chef Infra cookbooks and cookbook dependencies

Berkshelf is effectively deprecated. There is no ongoing maintenance and triage of issues. No active work is being done on bugfixes. The only work being done is to maintain it so that it continues to ship and run in its existing state.

Existing users should strongly consider migrating to Policyfiles and new users should avoid using Berkshelf.

Berkshelf is now included as part of the Chef Workstation. This is fastest, easiest, and the recommended installation method for getting up and running with Berkshelf.

note: You may need to uninstall the Berkshelf gem especially if you are using a Ruby version manager you may need to uninstall all Berkshelf gems from each Ruby installation.

If you are a developer or you prefer to install from Rubygems, we've got you covered.

Add Berkshelf to your repository's Gemfile:

gem 'berkshelf'

Or run it as a standalone:

$ gem install berkshelf

See docs.chef.io for up-to-date usage instructions.

Berkshelf is intended to be used as a CLI tool. It is not intended to be used as a library. Other ruby code should shell out to the command line tool to use it.

Berkshelf is tested and supported on Ruby 2.7 and later.

Berkshelf will search in specific locations for a configuration file. In order:

$PWD/.berkshelf/config.json
~/.berkshelf/config.json

You are encouraged to keep project-specific configuration in the $PWD/.berkshelf directory. A default configuration file is generated for you, but you can update the values to suit your needs.

• Bash
• ZSH

Please see Plugins page for more information.

• If you have an issue: report it on the issue tracker
• If you have a question: visit the #chef or #berkshelf channel on irc.freenode.net

Thank you to all of our Contributors, testers, and users.

If you'd like to contribute, please see our contribution guidelines first.

If you'd like to submit a patch:

1. Fork the project.
2. Make your feature addition or bug fix.
3. Add tests for it. This is important so that it isn't broken in a future version unintentionally.
4. Commit. Do not touch any unrelated code, such as the gemspec or version. If you must change unrelated code, do it in a commit by itself, so that it can be ignored.
5. Send a pull request.

Install git on your test system.

Install the latest version of Bundler

$ gem install bundler

Clone the project

$ git clone https://github.com/chef/berkshelf.git

and run:

$ cd berkshelf
$ bundle install

Bundler will install all gems and their dependencies required for testing and developing.

We use Chef Zero - an in-memory Chef Server for running tests. It is automatically managed by the Specs and Cukes. Run:

$ bundle exec guard start

or

$ bundle exec thor spec:ci

See here for a quick way to get a testing chef server up.

By default, Berkshelf will only give you the top-level output from a failed command. If you're working deep inside the core, an error like:

Berkshelf Error: wrong number of arguments (2 for 1)

isn't exactly helpful...

Specify the BERKSHELF_DEBUG flag when running your command to see a full stack trace and other helpful debugging information.

Once you are ready to release Berkshelf, perform the following:

1. Update CHANGELOG.md with a new header indicating the version to be released
2. Examine the diff (example) between main and the previous version. Add all merged Pull Requests to the CHANGELOG.md
3. Update version.rb to the desired release version
4. Run bundle update berkshelf
5. Create a PR and review the version.rb changes and CHANGELOG.md changes
6. Once the PR is merged to main, run rake release on the main branch

See COPYRIGHT.md.