[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Setting up a node from command line?

[Will Sargent < >]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Adam Jacob < "> > wrote:

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Will Sargent wrote:
> Well, the docs say "The JSON attributes file can be used to add

> specific Roles </display/chef/Roles> or Recipes
> </display/chef/Recipes> to a node during chef-client/chef-solo run

> time."  Not adding nodes themselves.  So if they can do that, it's
> undocumented.

Thanks for the note - yeah, we should make it clear that nodes get
created when the clients are run.

> So if I'm reading this right, I need to run
>
> sudo chef-client -j nothing.json -t "token"
>
> where nothing.json contains { "run_list": [ ] }
>
> And that will automatically create a node on the system, with nothing
> added to it?

Okay.  I think I'm getting a handle on this.  What really screwed me up was using the manual configuration guide in conjunction with the quick start guide.  The 

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Manual+Chef+Server+Configuration

says to use /etc/chef/server.rb, and all the paths in there are pointing to /var/chef

cookbook_path      [ "/var/chef/site-cookbooks", "/var/chef/cookbooks" ]

Meanwhile, new cookbooks asks you to use the opcodes repository as a base...

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Chef+Repository#ChefRepository-CreatenewCookbooks

But when you use the chef-repo and run rake install, it copies everything to /srv/cookbooks.

The best fix is probably to use /srv/chef as the canonical directory.

Will.