Knife::Plugin

Welcome to the knife plugin... plugin. This is a plugin for Chef's knife utility that is intended to aid in working with knife plugins.

This plugin should work in any Ruby environment where Chef itself works. If it does not, please file an issue.

Reasonable effort is made to ensure compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, but as that version is EOL, so I can't make any guarantees.

It is against the design goals of this plugin to have external Ruby dependencies beyond the Ruby Standard Library.

Install this plugin in the same Ruby environment as Chef and Knife. That is, use the gem binary that was used to install Chef. This may be different than the "system" gem binary. For example, on OS X with the Chef omnibus package:

$ /opt/chef/embedded/bin/gem install knife-plugin

Ironically, this plugin includes an install sub-command for doing just that.

This plugin provides sub-commands starting with knife plugin.

The create sub-command generates a plugin scaffolding in $HOME/.chef/plugins/knife. It is intended to be very simple to get the minimal amount of scaffolding created for a new plugin. It is not in the scope of this sub-command to create a full Ruby project that could be distributed as a RubyGem. My assumption is someone who needs that functionality will know about bundle gem or similar generators.

To create a new plugin:

knife plugin create wheels

This will create $HOME/.chef/plugins/knife/wheels.rb.

The install plugin will install another knife plugin packaged as a RubyGem, and available from the configured source(s) (usually rubygems.org) into the same Ruby environment where knife itself is.

knife plugin install knife-config
knife plugin install knife-ec2

Depending on the configuration of the local machine, administrative privileges may be required, e.g. sudo.

For ideas on contributions, see the Bugs list below, or check the issue tracker on this repository.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

I'd prefer to keep the scope of this plugin fairly narrow, so it is small and uncomplicated. New features (additional commands) will be considered but I may encourage new, separate pugins be created instead.

There are no tests.

The directory create plugin generates new plugins in is hardcoded. It should be configurable, or autodetect.

The create plugin may benefit from better methods to make snake case or camelcase strings as long as they do not introduce additional dependencies outside of Ruby stdlib. See #Requirements.

The install plugin takes only the first argument to the plugin (the name of the RubyGem to install) and discards the rest. Since this is passed into the gem command, it shouldn't silently drop additional arguments.

The create plugin uses a heredoc for the scaffolding. This should probably be an erb template instead.

• Author: Joshua Timberman (joshua@getchef.com)
• Copyright (c) 2014, Chef Software, Inc. (legal@getchef.com)

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.