Cookbook lib requiring gem

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi,

What’s the appropriate way to require a non-standard gem for a cookbook’s library? I’m adding a zip.rb library to my cookbook, but it requires ‘archive/zip’ to do the actual work.

Should manually installing that gem be a pre-requisite, or is there a clever way to bootstrap it with the gem_package resource in the recipe that uses it?

Or, is relying on extra gems frowned upon?

Thanks for any hints,
Andreas

2

Check this post from opscode blog where it explains how to require mysql
library and then using it in the same recipe:

Hope it helps.

Jacobo García López de Araujo
blog: http://robotplaysguitar.com
http://workingwithrails.com/person/13395-jacobo-garc-a

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Andreas Kollegger <
andreas.kollegger@neotechnology.com> wrote:

Hi,

What's the appropriate way to require a non-standard gem for a cookbook's
library? I'm adding a zip.rb library to my cookbook, but it requires
'archive/zip' to do the actual work.

Should manually installing that gem be a pre-requisite, or is there a
clever way to bootstrap it with the gem_package resource in the recipe that
uses it?

Or, is relying on extra gems frowned upon?

Thanks for any hints,
Andreas

3

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Hash: SHA1

Hello!

On Feb 23, 2011, at 11:22 AM, Andreas Kollegger wrote:

What's the appropriate way to require a non-standard gem for a cookbook's library? I'm adding a zip.rb library to my cookbook, but it requires 'archive/zip' to do the actual work.

Should manually installing that gem be a pre-requisite, or is there a clever way to bootstrap it with the gem_package resource in the recipe that uses it?

Or, is relying on extra gems frowned upon?

Not at all frowned on, and it is an encouraged feature of Chef :). In the recipe:

g = gem_package "archive-zip" do
  action :nothing
end

g.run_action(:install)
require 'rubygems'
Gem.clear_paths
require 'archive/zip'

You can see an example of this in a few of Opscode's cookbooks, such as 'aws':

https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/blob/master/aws/recipes/default.rb

Opscode, Inc
Joshua Timberman, Technical Evangelist
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman

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4

Perfectly clever. Thanks, guys.

Cheers,
Andreas

On Feb 23, 2011, at 7:35 PM, Joshua Timberman wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello!

On Feb 23, 2011, at 11:22 AM, Andreas Kollegger wrote:

What's the appropriate way to require a non-standard gem for a cookbook's library? I'm adding a zip.rb library to my cookbook, but it requires 'archive/zip' to do the actual work.

Should manually installing that gem be a pre-requisite, or is there a clever way to bootstrap it with the gem_package resource in the recipe that uses it?

Or, is relying on extra gems frowned upon?

Not at all frowned on, and it is an encouraged feature of Chef :). In the recipe:

g = gem_package "archive-zip" do
action :nothing
end

g.run_action(:install)
require 'rubygems'
Gem.clear_paths
require 'archive/zip'

You can see an example of this in a few of Opscode's cookbooks, such as 'aws':

https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/blob/master/aws/recipes/default.rb

Opscode, Inc
Joshua Timberman, Technical Evangelist
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman

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=StRw
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