Sync your cookbooks faster than knife cookbook upload or alternatives.

knife cookbook sync is primarily a development tool, but can be used for production work with careful coordination with an external cookbook resolver.

Here's the meat. knife cookbook sync vs knife cookbook upload with a pre-uploaded corpus of 39 cookbooks, using the standard unix time utility to benchmark on MRI 1.9.3-p327 and chef 10.16.2:

• knife cookbook sync -a: 1.31s user 0.15s system 72% cpu 2.020 total
• knife cookbook upload -a: 1.34s user 0.15s system 15% cpu 9.684 total

Instead of resolving and uploading everything (or even what you ask to upload), it uses the cryptographic sums chef already generates to determine what needs to be uploaded, and only uploads what's different.

This means it does not check versions and dependencies. It cheats, so you should be sure you have your ducks in a row before uploading by using a cookbook resolver. This only matters for determining what to upload -- cookbooks uploaded with knife cookbook sync are no different otherwise (and in fact use chef's own cookbook uploading tooling to do it).

Unsurprisingly, the more that has changed, the more the performance will decrease slowly towards knife cookbook upload performance. The gains are really only seen when you need to sync whole repositories where most or all of the product that's on-disk has already been uploaded. It's particularly nice for fast test cycles where you just don't want to care just yet what cookbooks have changed.

knife cookbook sync has no dependencies other than chef, and should be forward compatible with all versions of chef in the 10.x series, and probably beyond.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'knife_cookbook_sync'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install knife_cookbook_sync

knife cookbook sync takes a list of cookbooks or -a to upload everything. It uses your cookbook_path knife.rb settings to determine what's available to upload which is overridable by -o.

If you pass -d, it'll perform a "dry run" and just show you what it would upload.

For more information, use knife cookbook sync --help.

We support chef-workflow by way of a task you can use.

Add the 'knife_cookbook_sync' gem to your Gemfile (version 0.0.3 or later), and this to your Rakefile:

chef_workflow_task 'chef/cookbooks/sync'

And you'll have a chef:cookbooks:sync rake target you can use.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

• Erik Hollensbe [email protected]