Customising cookbook without using an Application Cookbook

Question

We can already override Cookbook Attributes in a Role or Node Object. What about Recipes? Can we use resources (LWRP) provided in a Cookbook without having to use a Cookbook Wrapper?

For instance, I'd like to install Jenkins with some plugins. The Jenkins cookbook shows that there's an attribute that can be used

node['jenkins']['server']['plugins']

It is however limited in only allowing plugin name and version. There is also a Resource documented in the Cookbook that seems to do what I want. Eg:

jenkins_plugin 'custom_plugin' do
  action :install
  version '0.3'
  url 'http://myrepo/jenkins/plugins/0.3/custom_plugin.hpi'
end

Do I need to create a whole Wrapper Cookbook and put this code in the /recipes/default.rb just to add this functionality to a Role or Node? This seems to be overkill.

Answer 1

When using any community cookbook, you should always read the recipes in depth as well. You would notice that the jenkins::server recipe allows you to set url in that hash as well as name and version.

In this particular case, you could override attributes like so:

node.override['jenkins']['server']['plugins'] = [
  {
    'name' => 'custom_plugin', 
    'version' => '0.3', 
    'url' => 'http://myrepo/jenkins/plugins/0.3/custom_plugin.hpi'
  }]

In the general case however, if this recipe wasn't flexible like this, then you would have to create a cookbook, that depends on the other cookbook (you don't have to execute the recipes, just depend on it), and define the resources using the LWRP in your own recipe.