Some people prefer to develop everything from scratch, and I prefer to reuse everything if it’s possible, the only rule that I need to follow is that I need to find out a way to do it without changing a third party application.

Some months ago, because of some security requirements, I needed to change the default configuration of the rsyslog cookbook. As you will see on the next code, the way that I found was to override the resource on the rsyslog cookbook from a cookbook that I had developed.

include_recipe "rsyslog"

begin
  t = resources(:template => "/etc/rsyslog.conf")
  t.source "rsyslog.conf.erb"
  t.cookbook "example"
rescue Chef::Exceptions::ResourceNotFound
  Chef::Log.warn "could not find template /etc/rsyslog.conf to modify"
end

This code instructs chef to use the file rsyslog.conf.erb, on the cookbook called example, when the resource for the file /etc/rsyslog.conf is called.

With this code, I was able to change the behavior of the default configuration of the rsyslog cookbook without touching the community cookbook.

EDIT 2026-04-24. The pattern above still compiles on modern Chef, but the current idiom is edit_resource (paired with delete_resource when needed), which is cleaner and skips the rescue block entirely.