Ohai Chefs!

Last week, we looked at how to get Chef clients grouped by version. This week, we’ll look at something completely different – customizing Vim to jump to included Chef recipes via the Goto File command – gf.

TL;DR

Add this to your .vimrc to be able to jump to included recipes (via include_recipe). Caveat: you can only jump to fully-qualified recipe names, e.g. my_cookbook::my_recipe. Hitting gf on include_recipe 'my_cookbook', won’t jump to my_cookbook::default.

1
2
3

" Make gf work on Chef include_recipe lines
" Add all cookbooks/*/recipe dirs to Vim's path variable
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile */cookbooks/*/recipes/*.rb setlocal path+=recipes;/cookbooks/**1

Read on to find out why this works.

Including Recipes

In Chef you can include one recipe in another recipe. For example, in one of our “application” cookbooks our default.rb recipe contains about 15 include_recipe statements which include recipes from the cookbook as well as recipes from other cookbooks. Often, I want to open one of the included recipes from the default recipe.

Vim Paths

1
2
3

" Make gf work on Chef include_recipe lines
" Add all cookbooks/*/recipe dirs to Vim's path variable
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile */cookbooks/*/recipes/*.rb setlocal path+=recipes;/cookbooks/**1

The autocmd above runs when you read in an existing file (BufRead) or create a new file (BufNewFile) in a Chef cookbook recipes directory. The directory path */cookbooks/*/recipes/*.rb assumes you have a cookbooks directory which contains your cookbooks and inside each cookbook you have a recipes directory.

The setlocal sets the path option locally for the recipe file, not globally in Vim.

The actual path value deserves a bit more explanation. path+=recipes;/cookbooks/**1 means append recipes to the current working directory, and also go upwards to the cookbooks directory and search all directories one level down from cookbooks and append recipes to those as well. So in other words it will search for the file under the cursor in the current cookbook’s recipe directory, and all other cookbooks’ recipe directories as well.

See Vim’s help on file searching for more info.

Conclusion

So there you have it.

1. Throw that line in your .vimrc file
2. ??

Being able to jump to included Chef recipes is a handy little trick, but there is one caveat. It doesn’t work for default recipes, e.g. include_recipe "foo". The next step for this trick is to use the includeexpr option to add default.rb to the filename.

Next week, we’ll look at various knife search tricks for getting data from your Chef server.