Where should I configure software installed by 3rd-party chef recipes?

Question

I'm provisioning a Vagrant virtual machine with Chef and it's amazing, but I'm unsure where I should put code to configure software installed by 3rd-party chef recipes.

For example, I'm installing NGINX with this recipe but I need to configure the default virtual host to serve content from /vagrant/public instead of /var/www/nginx-default.

Should I change the template of the 3rd-party recipe, or create another recipe that reconfigures it?

Answer 1

A couple of things:

Since the writing fo this question, Opscode has split out their repository structure to be one-repo-per-cookbook to make the project a lot clearer.

The up-to-date released, stable nginx cookbook can be found here: http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/nginx

As to serve web pages from an alternate container:

The convention to do something like this would be to write a simpler cookbook, that leverages the nginx cookbook but provides you with a way to "do what you want".

Since the default nginx installation drops a config file and sets the source dir, a way I would do this in a "wrapper" cookbook is:

1. Create my cookbook
2. Declare depends 'nginx' in metadata.rb

3. In my cookbook's attributes/default.rb, set the following attribute to false:

   default['nginx']['default_site_enabled'] = false
   

4. In my recipes/default.rb, have:

   include_recipe 'nginx'
   
   cookbook_file '/etc/nginx/sites-available/mycustomwebapp'
   
   nginx_site 'mycustomwebapp' do
     action :enable
   end
   

5. Create an nginx conf file that looks like this in files/default/mycustomwebapp:

   server {
       root /vagrant/public;
       index index.html index.htm;
           blah blah...
   }
   

Then you should be good to go!