How to unzip tar.Z file through CHEF cookbooks

I'm using a Chef hosted server, a workstation and nodes and have run cookbooks on the nodes to install Java, update hosts file. I'm not able to find a reference in sites to unzip tar files. Could you please help me out here or direct to some site which has the information.

Thanks in advance.

Solution

There's actually nothing built into Chef for doing extracting a tar file. You have two options, either you can use the execute resource to shell out and untar or use some community cookbook like the tar cookbook that have custom resources defined for extracting tars.

In the execute resource example it might look something like

execute 'extract_some_tar' do
  command 'tar xzvf somefile.tar.gz'
  cwd '/directory/of/tar/here'
  not_if { File.exists?("/file/contained/in/tar/here") }
end

Whereas the third party tar cookbook definitely reads nicer

tar_package 'http://pgfoundry.org/frs/download.php/1446/pgpool-3.4.1.tar.gz' do
  prefix '/usr/local'
  creates '/usr/local/bin/pgpool'
end