Chef Supermarket is a repository for cookbooks shared publicly. It’s a repository similar to GitHub. We can have two types of supermarket, private and other public. Public Chef Supermarket is HOSTED by Chef Software. We can find many general cookbooks like for eg: Nginx in public Chef supermarket. If any of the publicly shared cookbooks meet our requirements we can use them from the supermarket. We often come ACROSS situations where we need to modify the behavior of community cookbooks to achieve our requirements. This could be done by creating wrappers. So Chef supermarket is a central repository where one can share, download or collaborate on cookbooks.

Many companies prefer to create a private supermarket to share their company-specific cookbooks internally. Organisations whose cookbooks have security-related data prefer to only use private Chef Supermarket. They INSTALL a private supermarket by USING “supermarket-omnibus-cookbook” available in Chef public supermarket. Retrieval of a cookbook in a private supermarket is faster compared to the public supermarket as we have fewer cookbooks to search from and due to its proximity.