To work through this recipe, you will need the following:

We know we want to create a new cookbook named mysite so we can centralize everything related to making this application work in the same place. Let's use the chef command to do that:

$ chef generate cookbook cookbooks/mysite

To include a recipe from another cookbook with our default recipe, we'll use the include_recipe method in mysite/recipes/default.rb:

include_recipe "apache"
include_recipe "apache::virtualhost"
include_recipe "mariadb"
include_recipe "php"

This is telling Chef to load and execute the content of each recipe.

For Chef to know where this is to be found, we need to create a dependency to those cookbooks. This is done in the mysite/metadata.rb file:

depends "apache"
depends "mariadb"
depends "php"

Now, our MySite cookbook has a nice dependency graph: to fully work, it needs Apache, MariaDB, and PHP. The recipe details what exactly to run.

Since we have a dedicated cookbook for our app, let's try to add some customization to it. Remember the default sitename attribute in the apache cookbook? Let's override it to match our own value by adding the following at the top of the file, just before the apache recipes inclusion:

node.override["sitename"] = "mysite"

Upload the cookbook to the Chef server:

$ knife cookbook upload mysite

Remove previous recipes from our node's run list using knife node run_list remove <node name> <recipe name>:

$ knife node run_list remove vagrant "recipe[mariadb]" "recipe[php]" "recipe[apache]" "recipe[apache::virtualhost]"

The node's run list is now empty. Simply add the new mysite cookbook that includes everything it needs to run:

$ knife node run_list add vagrant mysite

The next Chef client run won't change anything, but it will be much easier to manage in the future!

Using puppet, a module can be used in other modules. Based on previous examples, we could think about a mysite module, with the following manifest:

class mysite (
   $website,
   $docroot
){
    class {
      'apache':;
      'php':;
      'mariadb':;
    }
    apache::vhost {$website:
       website => $website,
       docroot => $docroot,
    }
    file { $docroot:
      ensure => directory,
      owner   => 'www-data',
      group   => 'www-data',
      mode    => '0755',
    }
    file {"$docroot/index.php":
      ensure => present,
      owner   => 'www-data',
      group   => 'www-data',
      mode    => '0644',
      content => "<?php phpinfo() ?>",
    }
}

The main manifest of our node would be as follows:

node 'web.pomes.pro' {
    class {
      'mysite':
         website     => $fqdn,
         docroot  => "/var/www/$fqdn",
    }
}