Manage a Cookbook or an Application's Cookbook dependencies

Berkshelf is now included as part of the Chef-DK. This is fastest, easiest, and the recommended installation method for getting up and running with Berkshelf.

note: You may need to uninstall the Berkshelf gem especially if you are using a Ruby version manager you may need to uninstall all Berkshelf gems from each Ruby installation.

If you are a developer or you prefer to install from Rubygems, we've got you covered.

Add Berkshelf to your repository's Gemfile:

gem 'berkshelf'

Or run it as a standalone:

$ gem install berkshelf

See berkshelf.com for up-to-date usage instructions.

Berkshelf is tested on Ruby 1.9.3, 2.0, and 2.1.

Ruby 1.9 mode is required on all interpreters.

Ruby 1.9.1 and 1.9.2 are not officially supported. If you encounter problems, please upgrade to Ruby 2.0 or 1.9.3.

• Bash
• ZSH

Please see Plugins page for more information.

Berkshelf will search in specific locations for a configuration file. In order:

$PWD/.berkshelf/config.json
$PWD/berkshelf/config.json
$PWD/berkshelf-config.json
$PWD/config.json
~/.berkshelf/config.json

You are encouraged to keep project-specific configuration in the $PWD/.berkshelf directory. A default configuration file is generated for you, but you can update the values to suit your needs.

With Berkshelf 3 you can query a Berkshelf-API server (a server which indexes cookbooks from various sources and hosts it over a REST API) in order to resolve the cookbook dependencies. When you choose to host your own Berkshelf-API server, you can configure it to also index cookbooks hosted in various Github and/or Github Enterprise organizations.

When doing so you should also configure Berkshelf so it can download cookbooks from your indexed Github organizations:

{
  "github":[
    {
      "access_token": ""
    },
    {
      "access_token": "",
      "api_endpoint": "https://github.enterprise.local/api/v3",
      "web_endpoint": "https://github.enterprise.local",
      "ssl_verify": true
    }
  ]
}

The first subsection is used for any organization hosted on github.com. As this is the default, you do not have to set the endpoint info (these are known values for github.com). The second subsection is used when you also index cookbooks from organizations hosted on Github Enterprise. In this case you will need to specify the specific endpoint info so Berkshelf knows where to connect to. You can add as many subsections as you have endpoints.

If you have trouble getting Berkshelf to successfully talk to an SSL Chef Server, you can try making sure you have a certificate bundle available to your shell. export SSL_CERT_FILE=...path/to/cert/file...

If you need to disable SSL, you can in ~/.berkshelf/config.json like so:

{
  "ssl": {
    "verify": false
  }
}

The Berkshelf Core Team

Thank you to all of our Contributors, testers, and users.

If you'd like to contribute, please see our contribution guidelines first.