[chef] Re: Converging Attributes before first chef-client run

[Jonathan Matthews < >]

Well, answering my own question after a ludicrously short amount of
investigation (seriously, whoever wrote/hacked-on shef: the beers are
on me the next time you're in town!):

On 22 December 2010 00:21, Jonathan Matthews 
<
 >
 wrote:
[snip]
> * How can I coalesce the set of Attributes inherited by an as-yet
> inbuilt Node from its Roles and make it as equally accessible as those
> Attributes from *already-running* Nodes?
[snip]
> * Is shef the way forward? (The wiki page seems to rule out loading 
> Roles...)

Yes, shef is (the|an) answer! The wiki page will be getting a few
updates tomorrow (mainly the display of the help text), but here's
what I've just verified works:

---------------------------------------------------------------

 :~/.chef$
 NODE=my.host.fqdn.at.work ; echo "become_node
'"$NODE"' ; node.save " | shef --client
loading configuration: /home/jcm/.chef/shef.rb
Session type: solo
Loading.......done.

This is shef, the Chef shell.
 Chef Version: 0.9.12
 http://www.opscode.com/chef
 http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home

run `help' for help, `exit' or ^D to quit.

Ohai2u 

 
chef > become_node 'my.host.fqdn.at.work' ; node.save
Loading.....done.

 => <Chef::Node:0x3fa3b09646bc @name="my.host.fqdn.at.work">
---------------------------------------------------------------

At that point, Roles nested to (in my case) the 4th level were
correctly saved back to the Node.

There's obviously scripting to do around figuring out which hosts need
that bit of help pre-build, but I'm so impressed with shef - what a
brilliant tool!

Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Matthews
London, UK
http://www.jpluscplusm.com/contact.html