[theBaba]

> and I would add that the community provided recipes aren't very good either.

This is key. When I first got into using Chef, I assumed things would be no problem because all the services I used already had community recipes.

The community recipes are often wrong, don't work correctly on "clean" first-time installs and have a lot of baked in assumptions about the config and modules to use.

Clone these recipes into your repo, you will be modifying them. Blindly relying on the built in functionality to pull in and update the community repos will lead to pain.

Chef is a powerful tool, but it is also evolving rapidly and requires careful attention and testing.