Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
69 lines (50 loc) · 2.59 KB

rfc033-root-aliases.md

File metadata and controls

69 lines (50 loc) · 2.59 KB
Raw
RFC Title Author Status Type
33
Root Aliases in Cookbooks
Noah Kantrowitz <[email protected]>
Accepted
Standards Track

Root Aliases in Cookbooks

There are several common cases when writing Chef cookbooks that result in a folder containing a single file, usually called default.rb. Root aliases allow using a single file instead of a folder.

Motivation

As a cookbook author,
I want to less complex directory layouts,
so that learning and maintenance is easier.

Specification

There are two common cases where a single-file-in-folder comes up:

  1. attributes/default.rb
  2. recipes/default.rb

With attributes this is common to the point of almost complete irrelevance of other layouts given that all attribute files are always loaded. Recipes aren't exclusively singletons, but it is common enough to warrant a special case.

With this in mind, aliases are available for each:

  1. attributes.rb
  2. recipe.rb

It is an error for a cookbook to contain both an alias and its target or two aliases for the same target.

No aliases are provided for other types as they are generally a more advanced use case where the worry about learning curve is reduced.

Aliases are equivalent to their target file for purposes of loading either via standard cookbook loading or methods like include_recipe.

Rationale

This meshes well with RFC017 towards a goal of reducing the file layout complexity of simple cookbooks. There can be compatibility issues with tools that parse the cookbook manifest data and presume that all files from a given segment reside under the previously required folder, however the author knows of no such tools and given that the manifest format is mostly an internal representation this is not considered a blocker. Overall the goal of these RFCs is to remove the frequent use of single-child folders.

The choice of which aliases to provide and what to name them is mostly driven by the common cases, but is not exhaustive. attributes.rb and recipe.rb are chosen to match their usage grammatically. An additional alias of recipes.rb could be provided to match the folder name, but this is left for a future improvement based on usage feedback.

This was previously implemented in the unmerged dialects branch.

Copyright

This work is in the public domain. In jurisdictions that do not allow for this, this work is available under CC0. To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.