Installing software from source

If you need to install a piece of software that is not available as a package for your platform, you will need to compile it yourself.

In Chef, you can easily do this by using the script resource. What is more challenging is to make such a script resource idempotent – that means that it can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial application.

In the following recipe, we will see how to do both.

Getting ready

Make sure that you have a cookbook called 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.

Retrieve the required cookbooks:

1. Add them to your Berksfile:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
   source 'https://supermarket.chef.io'
   cookbook 'apt', '~> 5.0.0'
   cookbook 'build-essential', '~> 7.0.2'
   

2. Install them on your local workstation:

   mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ berks install
   Resolving cookbook dependencies...
   Fetching...