Vagrant Top-Level Cookbooks Plugin

This Vagrant 1.2+ plugin lets you specify the top-level cookbooks to deploy your VMs with. It will take care of cloning the top-level cookbook from the Git repository, resolve its dependencies via Berkshelf, and configure the Chef Solo provisioner accordingly.

Note: this plugin was previously (until v0.1.4) named vagrant-application-cookbooks, but since the term "application cookbook" is so much overloaded in the Chef community I now call them "top-level cookbooks".

• allows you to deploy top-level cookbooks from a git repository (remote or local)
• lets you choose a specific ref (i.e. commit, tag or branch) to deploy
• resolves each VMs toplevel cookbook dependencies in isolation to .vagrant/app-cookbooks/<vm-name>/cookbooks/ (i.e. no inter-VM dependency conflicts)
• uses the Berksfile that is shipped with the toplevel cookbook to resolve dependencies
• configures the cookbooks_path of the :chef_solo provisioner accordingly

Install using standard Vagrant plugin installation method:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-toplevel-cookbooks

To deploy the sample-app toplevel cookbook from the master branch:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define :sample do |sample_config|
    sample_config.toplevel_cookbook.url = "https://github.com/tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook"
    sample_config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef|
      chef.add_recipe "sample-app"
    end
  end
end

Or to deploy from a specific git ref, branch or tag:

...
    sample_config.toplevel_cookbook.url = "https://github.com/tknerr/sample-toplevel-cookbook"
    sample_config.toplevel_cookbook.ref = "some_ref"
...

You can also use local file URLs:

...
    sample_config.toplevel_cookbook.url = "file:///path/to/toplevel-cookbook"
...

To work on the vagrant-toplevel-cookbooks plugin, clone this repository out, and use Bundler to get the dependencies:

$ bundle

Once you have the dependencies, verify the unit tests pass with rake:

$ bundle exec rake

If those pass, you're ready to start developing the plugin. You can test the plugin without installing it into your Vagrant environment by using the Vagrantfile in the top level of this directory and use bundler to execute Vagrant.

To test that the my_app vm is deployed with the sample-app top-level cookbook simply run:

$ bundle exec vagrant up my_app