Where to put this Chef Recipe to downgrade gems (on EngineYard)?

Question

I am hosting my app on EngineYard's Appcloud -- gotta say that its a wonderful setup except that you have to use Chef to automate your configuration. And they don't quite take the time to tell the whole answer :) even with paid support!! Hope that coming up to speed with Chef is just a matter of time.

Here is the question, if you can help:

EngineYard tells me that the following chef recipe will automate the downgrade to the gems level needed my app (someday I'd upgrade to Rails 3.0 :) )

execute "downgrade rubygems" do
  command "gem update --system 1.4.2"
  user "root"
end

I am wondering where in my chef directory/file structure would this snippet go?

This is what my directory looks like:

README.md
Rakefile
cookbooks/
  main/
    attributes/
    definitions/
    libraries/
    recipes/

Thanks.

Answer 1

First, I'd copy the structure (from main) and to something like: cookbooks/my-rubygems

Then I'd create cookbooks/my-rubygems/recipies/default.rb and paste in what they told you.

Then you edit cookbooks/main/recipies/default.rb and make sure your recipe runs:

require_recipe "my-rubygems::default"

That's all.

Make sure your changes are committed and pushed. Next time you deploy, it should run your recipe.

In a nutshell, this is how you add additional recipies now. Group them a little (whatever makes sense) and then include them in main/recipies/default.rb.

Btw, chef is the best part of the EY-setup. ;-) They also have a comprehensive knowledgebase which covers these things. As far as chef is concerned, I recommend Opscode's wiki.

HTH!