[chef-dev] Re: local file copy resource?

[Noah Kantrowitz < >]

On Dec 8, 2012, at 3:41 PM, Jesse Campbell wrote:

> Looking at CHEF 1716 and CHEF-3676, I'm trying to figure out the best
> way to implement local file copies.
> 
> My thoughts:
> - The File resource is very simple, and that is a good thing, don't
> want to over load it doing too many things
> - CookbookFile is specific to installing files from a cookbook, but is
> almost identical to a local file copy. Adding a "local" option as for
> 1716 doesn't make sense, simply based on the naming
> 
> Here's a commit that adds the local option and would close 1716:
> https://github.com/jcam/chef/commit/f0df80d0aac1cced64dc3d6d8cd064968dac473b
> 
> 
> Here's Dan DeLeo's comments:
> 
> cookbook_file feels a bit wrong, since we've scoped it to have the
> functionality of pulling down files from the files/ section of a
> cookbook.
> 
> Putting it directly in the file resource also seems wrong, since it
> doesn't currently have a concept of a source where the file comes
> from.
> 
> This leaves two options I can think of:
> 
> 1. Add a local option to remote_file. This seems weird, since it's not
> really remote, but it fits with the idea of pulling a file from one
> place and putting it somewhere on the local system, just in this case
> that somewhere happens to be a file system available to the local box.
> 
> 2. Add a local_file resource and provider. This is the best conceptual
> fit, and it shouldn't be too bad to share functionality from other
> resources and providers via inheritance and composition. An argument
> against is that you're creating "resource sprawl".

How about 3. augment file so that #content can be a block returning a Ruby 
file object (or string) so you could do

file "foo" do
  owner "whatever"
  content { ::File.new("other") }
end

--Noah