create node definition without bootstrap ?

[paulczar]

I use vagrant a lot, and it would be really useful to be able to create a node without bootstrapping it. I can't see a way to do that currently.

[mattray]

I'm not a Vagrant user, but if you can help flesh out how this would work I'll see what I can do.

[gtmtech]

I used to use chef with vagrant, and built my own base VM with Veewee which included the base OS + chef. Then I could vagrant up a node using chef_solo to provision with no bootstrapping required.

[mattray]

After discussing this at the Austin Chef Cafe, I've got a better feel for what you want now. We want to load node objects onto the Chef server without bootstrapping via "knife node from file". This is definitely doable, I'll mark it for the 2.6 release, probably with a new flag like --node-only to knife bootstrap from file FOO and then knife node run list add FOO "recipe[blah],role[blahblah] if there's a run list with the node defined. Does that sound good?

[paulczar]

Perfect! <3

[mrsqueeze]

+1 on this feature. It would be a big help for deploying cluster services that need multiple rounds to complete.

[claco]

Along the lines of @grumpyhacker , a multiple run scenario would be quite easy if I could have spiceweasel output the contents of the manifest in the exact order I declared them. If does order things in the nodes, knife sections, but it runs those sections in a specific order, which sometimes is not what I intended. if I have to revert to putting everything in knife:, I might as well just drop in a shell script which I hate. :-)

[mattray]

I got about halfway through the feature and got sidetracked on some other stuff. I expect I'll have it done before the end of next week.

[mattray]

Working and merged to master, still looking at another issue or 2, hope to push out 2.6 soon.