This article will show you how to share a cookbook on the public Chef Supermarket. The public Supermarket uses Hosted Chef, the Chef-as-a-service provider, for user authentication. You will need a Hosted Chef account to share cookbooks.

Read on in the Resolution and other sections for more. 

If you already use Hosted Chef as your Chef Infra Server, you can skip directly to the sharing your cookbook section under Resolution.

Create a Hosted Chef Account 

1. Go to the Hosted Chef signup page and enter the requested information to create your account.

2. You will receive a confirmation email. Use the link in the email to confirm your confirm your email address.

3. Log in to Hosted Chef and select the Create New Organization button:

   

4. Download and extract the Hosted Chef starter kit:

   

Share Cookbooks via Knife 

Use the knife supermarket command to upload cookbooks to the Supermarket via Knife. In this section, you will configure the chef-repo that was created by the Hosted Chef starter kit, and then upload cookbooks from your workstation’s cookbook repository.

Note

If you’re using Hosted Chef as your regular Chef Infra Server, skip to the second step.

1. The config.rb file located under /chef-repo/.chef/config.rb contains the basic information necessary to authenticate with Hosted Chef. It will look similar to the following:

   current_dir = __dir__
   node_name                'brewn'
   client_key               "#{current_dir}/brewn.pem"
   chef_server_url          'https://api.chef.io/organizations/chfex';
   cookbook_path            ["#{current_dir}/../cookbooks"]
   

   However, if you’re not an existing Hosted Chef user, you’ve most likely created your cookbooks within another repository with its own Knife configuration. Instead of modifying your workstation setup, simply add the path to your cookbook repository under the cookbook_path setting in your Hosted Chef chef-repo. For example:

   cookbook_path            ['~/my-repo/cookbooks']
   

2. Use the knife supermarket command to upload your cookbook to the Supermarket:

   knife supermarket share example_cookbook
   

   Alternatively, if you choose not to modify the location of your cookbook repository within your config.rb, you can specify the cookbook path in your knife command:

   knife supermarket share example_cookbook -o ~/my-repo/cookbooks

   To read the complete documentation on sharing your cookbooks with the Chef Supermarket, you can go here.