I know this is a year later, but your post is one of the only ones that I found in regards to this. I found that including the metadata.rb file caused major problems with overlaying the cookbook. I found by digging into the cookbook location that it's probably easier to just have a repository the has the cookbooks at the top level. Don't include any of the files that your aren't overlaying, and don't include that diretory in berksfile. Then opsworks will merge the two directories, dropping your overlaid files on top of theirs, and then it looks at the merged-cookbooks directory for all cookbooks. If you include a metadata.rb and or include it in berksfile then it will also overwrite those metadata.rb files, which isn't what you want.
Thanks for the great post! This is probably how it was previously, just thought I'd post an update.
I know this is a year later, but your post is one of the only ones that I found in regards to this. I found that including the metadata.rb file caused major problems with overlaying the cookbook. I found by digging into the cookbook location that it's probably easier to just have a repository the has the cookbooks at the top level. Don't include any of the files that your aren't overlaying, and don't include that diretory in berksfile. Then opsworks will merge the two directories, dropping your overlaid files on top of theirs, and then it looks at the merged-cookbooks directory for all cookbooks. If you include a metadata.rb and or include it in berksfile then it will also overwrite those metadata.rb files, which isn't what you want.
Thanks for the great post! This is probably how it was previously, just thought I'd post an update.