Masterbaker spawned from the Soloist project, and lets you quickly and easily converge Chef recipes using chef-solo. It does not require a Chef server, but can exploit community cookbooks, github-hosted cookbooks and locally-sourced cookbooks through Librarian.

Masterbaker was designed with users in mind, allowing a global runlist as well as user-specific.

1. First, agree to XCode License:

    $sudo xcodebuild -license
   

2. You'll need to have Masterbaker installed:

    $ gem install masterbaker
   

3. You'll need a Cheffile in your home directory that points Librarian to all the cookbooks you've included:

    $ cat ~/.bakery/Cheffile // or ~/.masterbaker/masterbakerrc
    site "http://community.opscode.com/api/v1"
    cookbook "pivotal_workstation",
             :git => "https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation"
   

4. You'll need to create a ~/.bakery/bakeryrc or ~/.masterbaker/masterbakerrc file in your home directory to tell Chef which recipes to converge:

    $ cat /Users/pivotal/.bakery/bakeryrc
    recipes:
      - pivotal_workstation::default
      - pivotal_workstation::sublime_text
   

5. It's always a good idea to see what is found and will be installed on next run using config:

    $ bake config
   

6. You'll need to run masterbaker for anything to happen:

    $ bake
   

Here's an example of a ~/.bakery/bakeryrc or ~/.masterbaker/masterbakerrc:

cookbook_paths:
  - /opt/beans
recipes:
  - beans::chili
  - beans::food_fight
  - napkins

This tells Masterbaker to search in both /opt/beans and ./cookbooks (relative to the ~/.bakery or ~/.masterbaker directories) for cookbooks to run. Then, it attempts to converge the beans::chili, beans::food_fight and napkins recipes.

Masterbaker lets you override node attributes. Let's say we've got a bash::prompt recipe for which we want to set node['bash']['prompt']['color']='p!nk'. No problem!

recipes:
  - bash::prompt
node_attributes:
  bash:
    prompt:
      color: p!nk

Masterbaker allows conditionally switching on environment variables. Let's say we only want to include the embarrassment::parental recipe when the MEGA_PRODUCTION environment variable is set to juggalos. Here's the ~/.bakery/bakeryrc or ~/.masterbaker/masterbakerrc:

cookbook_paths:f
  - /fresno
recipes:
  - disaster
env_variable_switches:
  MEGA_PRODUCTION:
    juggalos:
      recipes:
        - embarrassment::parental

So now, this is the result of our Masterbaker run:

$ MEGA_PRODUCTION=juggalos bake
Installing disaster (1.0.0)
Installing embarrassment (1.0.0)
… chef output …
INFO: Run List expands to [disaster, embarrassment::parental, faygo]
… chef output …

If we set MEGA_PRODUCTION=godspeed, the embarrassment::parental recipe is not converged.

Masterbaker can also run one-off recipes:

$ bake run_recipe lice::box
Installing lice (1.0.0)
… chef output …
INFO: Run List expands to [lice::box]
… chef output …

This just runs the lice::box recipe from your current set of cookbooks. It still uses all the node_attributes and env_variable_switches logic.

Masterbaker runs chef-solo at log level info by default, which is helpful when you need to see what your Chef run is doing. If you need more information, you can set the LOG_LEVEL environment variable:

$ LOG_LEVEL=debug bake

The default log level is FATAL to prevent undesireable output.

See LICENSE for details.