Why can't chef resolve my cookbooks?

Make sure you have configured your chef_repo_path as described in the docs.

Basically local-mode needs to know where to find your cookbooks, roles, environments, data bags, etc. Sadly, the documentation is not super clear on where/how you set chef_repo_path

Here's what I can tell from the code.

1. if client.rb is found and contains cookbook_path, chef_repo_path = "#{cookbook_path}/.."
2. if knife.rb is found and contains cookbook_path, chef_repo_path = "#{cookbook_path}/.."
3. Chef can try to divine the path. The code will search from pwd upward looking for a directory called cookbooks. If it finds it, then cookbooks/.. will be set as your chef_repo_path.
4. If all else fails, pwd will be used as your chef_repo_path

If you are using Berkshelf, your best bet is to do a berks vendor in order to get a single directory will ALL of the cookbooks you need. You can then point chef_repo_path to the parent of the cookbooks directory which holds your vendored cookbooks.

Mind you, that's from 10 minutes of digging in the source code, so I may not have it quite right.

While looking to run locally for testing I ran into the same "cannot resolve cookbook" error. Since I potentially want to run cookbooks without a Chef server but also without ChefDK installed for non-Chef developers to do a simple one time workstation setup, I put together the following workflow.

Your cookbook needs to live in a folder under a folder called cookbooks, this appears to be hardcoded "magic", but it seems to be able to live anywhere, eg userdir/projects/cookbooks/my_cookbook_name/.

If you have a Berksfile for the dependencies you need to get them locally before you can run chef-client -z -o my_cookbook_name so run berks vendor to pull the dependencies into a cookbooks directory in the current folder.

The berks vendor command pulls your other dependencies into the cookbooks directory so chef-zero/chef-solo can find them. Run the following in an Administrator PowerShell prompt, it may be Command Prompt compatible but I try not to encourage using cmd.exe.

cd /path/to/cookbooks/my_cookbook_name berks vendor . chef-client -z -o my_cookbook_name

The beauty of using the new chef-zero built into the client is you don't necessarily need the full ChefDK to test, though you will need berkshelf for the berks command on at least 1 machine as getting that installed without the ChefDK is a nightmare. Once you have berks you can run berks package and copy the file it creates to a machine with just the chef-client and extra it somewhere and then run the chef-client -z -o your_cookbook in the directory containing the cookbooks folder.

To get just chef use the omnibus installer and you have enough to bootstrap a node or run the recipe.

. { iwr -useb https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.ps1 } | iex; install -channel stable -project chef

If you need your berks and want a quick way to get the ChefDK, this will do the trick.

. { iwr -useb https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.ps1 } | iex; install -channel stable -project chefdk