Creating and using a Custom Resource

Now that we have our use case defined and a working solution created, we want to introduce updates to the cookbook to turn what we have into a better solution that uses Custom Resources. Specifically, we are going to create a "website" Custom Resource.

What makes up a Custom Resource?

Custom Resources are created by making a Ruby file in the cookbook's resources folder. The resource name will be the name of the file created. For example, if we want to create a "website" Custom Resource, we would create a new Ruby file named website.rb, as follows:

mkdir –p ~/chef-repo/cookbooks/mywebapp/resources
touch ~/chef-repo/cookbooks/mywebapp/resources/website.rb

This will create a new folder named resources and create an empty file named website.rb in that folder.

Tip

Creating a default.rb resource file: If you create a resource file named default.rb, the resource will have the same name as the cookbook.

A cookbook can have multiple resources. Each one would be defined...