Creating configuration files using templates

The term Configuration Management already says it loud and clear: your recipes manage the configuration of your nodes. In most cases, the system configuration is held in local files, on disk. Chef uses templates to dynamically create configuration files from given values. It takes such values from data bags or attributes, or even calculates them on-the-fly before passing them into a template.

Let's see how we can create configuration files by using templates.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook named my_cookbook and that the run_list of your node includes my_cookbook, as described in the Creating and using cookbooks recipe in Chapter 1, Chef Infrastructure.

How to do it…

Let's use a template resource to create a configuration file:

1. Edit your cookbook's default recipe:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb
   template "/etc/logrotate.conf" do
     source "logrotate.conf.erb"
     variables(
       how_often: "daily"...