Where to Store Local Software Packages for Chef Recipe

Question

I have a Ruby .deb package that I built from source using checkinstall. I'm using it with a Chef recipe to install Ruby on one of my nodes. Right now I'm storing it under files/default in my recipe, where one would normally store config files or templates to upload to the server. This works well enough but I wonder what the "right" way to solve this problem would be. Where do people store local binaries or packages when they want to install them with Chef this way? Should I create a server to store these, then download them as needed through my recipes?

Answer 1

Ideally you would host a repository server like apt (or gem, etc. Whatever suits) and configure your repository sources on chef clients to include that server.