How to download and install files with Chef

Question

I have a basic Chef setup that works fine to install systems with specific servers and configs. My goal is to be able to install everything without SSHing into the server. In that specific case I am installing the Neo4j database and want to add a plugin to it (authentication extension) and the install process is to download a .jar and copy it over to a folder. How can I do that with Chef?

Answer 1

You are probably looking for remote_file:

remote_file "/destination-folder/large-file.tar.gz" do
   source "http://www.example.org/large-file.tar.gz"
end