[chef] Re: newbie question: errors in cookbooks

[Paul Paradise < >]

Raphael,

In general, cookbooks should declare their dependencies so including a given recipe in your run list (say, recipe[tomcat6]) will pull in all the dependent cookbooks. Oftentimes this results in "cookbook bloat" on a given node, because the node will download a bunch of cookbooks that might not be used - optional dependencies, essentially. You're in the opposite situation - tomcat6 needs Java to run, but it isn't a declared dependency.

Regarding the updated_by_last_action issue you're seeing - this is a consequence of having your mysql cookbook out-of-sync with the requisite chef-client version. What version of chef are you running, and what version of the mysql cookbook are you running? If my memory is correct, the most recent version of the mysql cookbook will break in the fashion you describe if you're running Chef <= 0.9.8.

The cookbooks opscode maintains at github.com/opscode/cookbooks are considered "in-development" and only pushed to the cookbooks.opscode.com site when they're stable. I used to use the cookbooks from the git repo, but switched to using the cookbooks.opscode.com site recently. The ability to run "knife cookbook site vendor" to pull down the latest version and merge it with local changes won me over. That said, there have been times when I've wanted something a bit more bleeding edge and I've manually applied a patch from the git repo.

-Paul

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 5:15 AM, Raphael Bauduin < "> > wrote:

Hi,

I'm just starting with Chef, and am using the cookbooks from github,
but encounter some problems.
I have checked out all cookbooks and created my own recipe that is
run, and it is this recipe that requires the recipes I need from the
repository.
The first problem I get is in the tomcat6 recipe:
 undefined method [] for nil:NilClass: stderr
it comes from the cookbook's attribute file line 45:
https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/blob/master/tomcat6/attributes/default.rb#L45

I think it occurs because it needs a specific config set to run, and I
didn't set it. Does that mean it is a bad idea to checkout all recipes
and only require those I need in my own recipe?

Second, the mysql::server recipe causes errors.
The first time it runs, I get an error uninitialised constant Mysql.
When I run it again, I get an undefined method 'updated_by_last_action'
when I run it a third time, it passes.

Does anyone have the same behaviour? Any hint of the cause of this
strange behaviour?

I'm also wondering if it's a good idea to use the cookbooks directly
from the git repo. Are these considered as stable enough to be used or
is it the development version? (I saw only a beta branch in addition
to the master branch, and no tag defined).

thanks in advance for your help!

Raphaël

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