One of the great features of Chef is that you write configurations in Ruby. When wanting to push a number of configuration files out for nagios, I initially turned to the Remote Directory resource. However this could interfere with configuration files created and owned by the debian package, so I needed to be more specific. In the past with Puppet I’ve had a remote file definition (that uses the file type) for each configuration file. This works fine, but gets to be repetitive when it doesn’t need to be. With Chef, you can combine a little ruby with the Remote File resource like so:

for config in [ "contacts.cfg", "contactgroups.cfg" ] do
  remote_file "/etc/nagios3/#{config}" do
    source "#{config}"
    owner "root"
    group "root"
    mode 0644
    notifies :restart, resources(:service => "nagios"), :delayed
  end
end

The benefit of this approach is that it makes your configuration management cleaner and more DRY. This is perhaps at the cost of a little complexity, albeit at a degree that I think is pretty easily understood by reading the code.