Berks-monolith is a companion command to berkshelf that takes all cookbooks mentioned in a Berksfile and places development friendly versions of them under a single directory. Usually, this means you will end up with git clones for all cookbooks with git repositories in the Berksfile, and static copies of cookbooks that don't have identifiable VCS repositories.

• You have a Berksfile with many git based sources, and want a quick way to clone them all under a single directory.
• You have a mostly monolithic repository, but make use of berkshelf to manage dependencies and use external cookbook sources, and you'd like to have everything in one place to be able to search.
• You are transitioning between a monolithic repository workflow and a independent software artefacts workflow, and have a mix of artefacts in a Berksfile as well as cookbooks in a monolithic repository, and you want all cookbooks in one place.

The berks vendor command comes close to what monolith does, grabbing all cookbooks mentioned in a Berksfile and putting copies of them under a single directory. However, berks vendor is intended for production rather than development use, and explicitly strips any VCS directories, chef ignored files, and metadata.rb files.

The berks install command collects all cookbooks into ~/.berkshelf/cookbooks, but again VCS information is stripped out, and this contains all cookbooks, not just those associated with a specific Berksfile.

Install from rubygems:

gem install berks-monolith

Or to install the development version from a git clone:

rake install

Clones/copies all cookbooks mentioned in the berksfile. By default they go into the 'cookbooks' directory. You can specify an alternate path if you wish by specifying it on the command line: berks-monolith install vendor.

Exactly what you get depends on what the source of the cookbook is in the berksfile:

• Normal community cookbooks (e.g. if you just specify cookbook 'foo' with no other options) are just copied in place from the berkshelf directory.
• Git cookbooks will result in a clone of the repository pointing to the original source repository.
• Path cookbooks will be skipped completely. This means you don't have to worry if you have existing local cookbooks in a monolithic repository in your Berksfile. They won't be copied again.

Updates the cloned copies of cookbooks if possible. In practice this means 'run git pull' for all git clones.

Removes all cookbooks that were installed with berks-monolith install. Anything else in the cookbooks directory is left alone.