Cookbooks

Writing a new cookbook? Chef resources

The common cookbooks I use to configure boxes. This repo is really designed to be a sub-repo in other repos.

Every cookbook should have a README.md file that should tell you how to configure it and what it does (if the name isn't self explanatory enough).

Tips and Common pitfalls when writing cookbooks

these are things I always forget and have to remember time and time again.

Chef configuration in Vagrant

Upstart and Vagrant shared folders

If your Upstart script relies on system startup to start your scripts, something like:

start on (local-filesystems and runlevel [2345])

and your scripts depend on something in one of your repos that Vagrant mounts as a shared folder, then chances are your scripts aren't going to actually start when the Vagrant box is brought up.

There are two solutions, one is to just move the files to a new place, for example, the spiped cookbook will move the keys from our repo to /etc/spiped on the box so they will be there on machine start.

You can also have your upstart script also listen on vagrant-mounted events, this is what the uwsgi cookbook does.

start on ((local-filesystems and runlevel [2345]) or vagrant-mounted)

I evidently prefer the first method since most of the cookbooks ultimately go with that, I did it the other way with uwsgi because I forgot about this (which is why it is now in this readme :) )

/var/run is not permanent storage

I don't know how many times I'm going to need to learn this, but on startup, this directory is cleared, so you can't just have your cookbook create a directory in /var/run and set its permissions, you need to actually do it in your upstart script

pre-start script
    # mode is world executable because evidently you need to execute something to write
    # directory is completely opened because each command could be run under a different user
    mkdir -p -m0777 <%= @run_dir %>
    #chown <%= @username %>:<%= @group %> <%= @run_dir %>
end script

Running Chef on Vagrant Manually

$ cd /tmp/vagrant-chef
$ chef-client --config solo.rb -j dna.json --local-mode

Printing out values in recipes

require "pp"
pp "======================================================================="
pp node["<RECIPE_NAME>"]
pp "======================================================================="

Changes in Vagrant chef.json not propogating to chef run

Sometimes, when I'm testing cookbooks and so I'm running vagrant provision a lot the changes I make to the chef.json don't seem to propogate, this seems to be because of a cache file, something like:

/tmp/vagrant-chef/f8484c02f82283b9072da693e6402db9/nodes/vagrant-fb4087a6.json

That will have the original values of the /tmp/vagrant-chef/dna.json file.

Deleting the vagrant-fb4087a6.json file seems to fix it.

Search

vagrantfile removing key in chef.json doesn't get rid of value because of node

Chef OS Environment

if platform?('ubuntu') && node['platform_version'].to_f <= 14.04

Service stopping and starting

When wanting to restart a service on change, it's usually better to do this:

notifies :stop, "service[<NAME>]", :delayed
notifies :start, "service[<NAME>]", :delayed

Over...

notifies :restart, "service[<NAME>]", :delayed

The reason why is sometimes not everything is in place or the service isn't currently running when you want to restart, and so it will fail, but the stop then start method seems to mitigate this and reliably works with changes and stuff.

Jaymon / chef-cookbooks

readme