Difference between 'knife cookbook create' and 'chef generate cookbook'?

Question

I'm struggling with the chef learning curve. What is the difference between these two commands, and why are there two of them ?

knife cookbook: The knife cookbook subcommand is used to interact with cookbooks that are located on the Chef server or the local chef-repo.

$ knife cookbook create a_knife_cookbook
$ ls -a
  CHANGELOG.md 
  README.md    
  attributes
  definitions
  files
  libraries
  metadata.rb
  providers
  recipes
  resources
  templates

chef generate cookbook: The chef generate cookbook subcommand is used to generate a cookbook.

$ chef generate cookbook a_chef_cookbook
$ ls -a
  .gitignore
  .kitchen.yml
  Berksfile
  README.md
  chefignore
  metadata.rb
  recipes
  spec
  test

Solution

knife cookbook create is the legacy way to create a cookbook, it builds the structure of a cookbook with all possible directories.

chef generate cookbook is part of Chef-DK and aims at generating a testable cookbook structure with minimal directories to use in test-kitchen.

Both can be tweaked, the chef generate is easiest to tweak as the command has been written in this way to allow all to build the cookbook structure that better fits their needs.