Why are there so many cookbooks attached to the ServerTemplate?

Overview

When viewing a ServerTemplate, you may get a notice that there are unused cookbooks attached to the ServerTemplate. This is an informational message only and doesn't require any action on your part. This message only displays on ServerTemplates created before August 23, 2013.

This message displays because RightScale has detected that you have cookbooks attached to the ServerTemplate that are not being used by the ServerTemplate: there are no recipes in the runlist and no other cookbooks depends on these cookbooks.

For all ServerTemplates that were migrated pre-August 2013, this warning is shown because of the technique used to migrate. As the diagram below depicts, after the migration, all cookbooks from all repositories that were part of the RepoPath pre-migration have been attached to the ServerTemplate. This approach was taken to ensure that the ServerTemplates continue to operate as before, even if the cookbook metadata wasn't complete or correct.

Resolution

No action is necessary on these ServerTemplate for them to operate correctly. Optionally, if you'd like the message removed, you have a couple of options:

• Remove the unused cookbooks - simply removing the cookbooks from which you're not using any recipes will get rid of the message.
• Clone the ServerTemplate - cloning the ServerTemplate creates a new lineage with a creation date after the Aug 23 cutoff, so the message will no longer be displayed. For more information, see Clone a ServerTemplate.
• Import v13.5+ RightScale ServerTemplate - all RightScale-published ServerTemplates v13.5 or greater will not show this message as we've removed all of the unused cookbooks. For more information, see ServerTemplates.