Clean up your cookbook mess with meez

Is your kitchen a mess? Meez will help you get things straightened out.

There is a new gem in town, and it’s here to clean up the mess you made out of your cookbooks.  Its called meez.  

If you are like me, maybe you started writing some chef cookbooks, and then later decided to add some testing and you followed some blog posts to set up some different tools.  Some where along the way you figured out that the cool kids don’t use Librarian (although I still am fond of it) so you decide to use Berkshelf (I am learning to like it).  You also figured out that you need a linting tool and some sort of way to do TDD for your infrastructure. Man, this cookbook is starting to get pretty crowded with a bunch of files that have nothing to do with actually installing the code you want to install.  You also start looking around and wondering why you have to learn all these esoteric frameworks/tools to write a simple chef cookbook (technically you don’t have to, but the technohipsters frown on you if you don’t).

What are you to do?

Enter meez. Meez sets up an opinionated cookbook replete with all the testing tools and frameworks a modern chef requires: chefspec, foodcritic, rubocop, berkshelf, kitchenci, …  Once you tell meez to create a cookbook for you, it sets up all the different frameworks and gets you ready to start actually writing your recipes and working on your cookbook.  No more remembering how to setup all the testing tools and frameworks.  Sweet!


gem install meez
meez --cookbook-path /tmp -C "James Wickett" -m james@wickett.me mycookbook


What this will do is set up ‘mycookbook’ with all the testing tools you need.  By giving it my name and email, it autofills all that in the relevant spots as well.  Once meez finishes running, it tells you what to do next:


You must run `bundle install' to fetch any new gems.
Cookbook mycookbook created successfully
Next steps...
$ cd /tmp/mycookbook
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec berks install
$ bundle exec strainer test


Follow those steps and you are now ready to start working on cookbooks and stop worrying about all the testing frameworks and tools surrounding TDD and chef.

Meez was created as a gem after @pczarkowski‘s excellent sysadvent blog post “The Lazy SysAdmin’s Guide to Test Driven Chef Cookbooks.” Reading that will give you more context behind what meez is doing.

Moar Links

• The Berkshelf Way Presentation by Jamie Windsor
• Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef by Seth Vargo