Using community Chef style
It's easier to read code that adheres to a coding style guide. It is important to deliver consistently styled code, especially when sharing cookbooks with the Chef community. In this chapter, you'll find some of the most important rules (out of many more—enough to fill a short book on their own) to apply to your own cookbooks.
Getting ready
As you're writing cookbooks in Ruby, it's a good idea to follow general Ruby principles for readable (and therefore maintainable) code.
Chef Software, Inc. proposes Ian Macdonald's Ruby Style Guide (http://www.caliban.org/ruby/rubyguide.shtml#style) but, to be honest, I prefer Bozhidar Batsov's Ruby Style Guide (https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style-guide) due to its clarity.
Let's look at the most important rules for Ruby in general and for cookbooks specifically.
How to do it…
Let's walk through a few Chef style guide examples:
Use two spaces per indentation level:
remote_directory node['nagios']['plugin_dir'] do source 'plugins...
