Berkshelf

The Berkshelf is a location on your local disk which contains the cookbooks you have installed and their dependencies. By default, The Berkshelf is located at ~/.berkshelf but this can be altered by setting the environment variable BERKSHELF_PATH. Berkshelf stores every version of a cookbook that you have ever installed. This is the same pattern found with RubyGems where once you have resolved and installed a gem, you will have that gem and it’s dependencies until you delete it. This central location is not the typical pattern of cookbook storage that you may be used to with Chef. The traditional pattern is to place all of your cookbooks in a directory called cookbooks or site-cookbooks within your Chef Repository. We do have all of our cookbooks in one central place, it’s just not the Chef Repository and they’re stored within directories named using the convention {name}-{version}.

via Delicious http://berkshelf.com/