knife cookbook sync

Note: this gem has been renamed to be more conformant with knife plugin naming on rubygems.org. The original gem was named knife_cookbook_sync.

Sync your cookbooks faster than knife cookbook upload or alternatives.

knife cookbook sync is primarily a development tool, but can be used for production work with careful coordination with an external cookbook resolver.

Here's the meat. knife cookbook sync vs knife cookbook upload with a pre-uploaded corpus of 39 cookbooks, using the standard unix time utility to benchmark on MRI 1.9.3-p327 and chef 10.16.2:

  • knife cookbook sync -a: 1.31s user 0.15s system 72% cpu 2.020 total
  • knife cookbook upload -a: 1.34s user 0.15s system 15% cpu 9.684 total

Instead of resolving and uploading everything (or even what you ask to upload), it uses the cryptographic sums chef already generates to determine what needs to be uploaded, and only uploads what's different.

This means it does not check versions and dependencies. It cheats, so you should be sure you have your ducks in a row before uploading by using a cookbook resolver. This only matters for determining what to upload -- cookbooks uploaded with knife cookbook sync are no different otherwise (and in fact use chef's own cookbook uploading tooling to do it).

Unsurprisingly, the more that has changed, the more the performance will decrease slowly towards knife cookbook upload performance. The gains are really only seen when you need to sync whole repositories where most or all of the product that's on-disk has already been uploaded. It's particularly nice for fast test cycles where you just don't want to care just yet what cookbooks have changed. However, you can use it for all uploading without any real issue.

knife cookbook sync has no dependencies other than chef, and is compatible with both chef 10.x and 11.x.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'knife-cookbook-sync'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install knife-cookbook-sync

Usage

knife cookbook sync takes a list of cookbooks or -a to upload everything. It uses your cookbook_path knife.rb settings to determine what's available to upload which is overridable by -o.

If you pass -d, it'll perform a "dry run" and just show you what it would upload.

See "Exit Statuses" below for information on how knife cookbook sync can let you know what it did (you know, for scripting yo).

For more information, use knife cookbook sync --help.

Exit Statuses

The following exit codes are used in various situations:

  • 0: nothing went wrong, but we did not see anything different. Works in dry run and sync mode.
  • 1: Something is not right -- usually this means you have a broken cookbook_path or did not supply -o. Whereever Chef is sending its UI output will have the information you seek (usually Standard Error).
  • 5: nothing went wrong, but there are differences between what's in your cookbook_path and the chef server. Works in dry run and sync mode.

Chef-Workflow support

We support chef-workflow by way of a task you can use.

Add the 'knife-cookbook-sync' gem to your Gemfile (version 0.1.0 or later), and this to your Rakefile:

chef_workflow_task 'chef/cookbooks/sync'

And you'll have a chef:cookbooks:sync rake target you can use.

Contributing

  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

Authors