[chef] Re: Re: Dynamically include recipes?

[Ian Marlier < >]

Sean --

Thanks for the reply, but that's a little bit different than what I'm trying to do.  I'm not actually interested (in this case) in a list of nodes with a given cookbook installed.  

Instead, what I'm interested in is a list of _cookbooks_ that contain a _recipe_ with a given name, so that I can include all of those recipes.  In my use case, those recipes would define a nagios checkcommand and a nagios service.

What I had hoped to do was this:

cookbooks = search(:cookbooks, "recipe:nagios")

cookbooks.each do |c|

    include_recipe "#{c}::nagios"

end

However, the search function doesn't appear to work on cookbooks.  I'm wondering if there's another way that I can do this.  

If there's no way to do this within Chef, I can work around it, for example by doing some bash scripting at cookbook upload time -- though that would be disappointing, as it would effectively make this recipe only operable in certain chef server environments.  If there's a "real" way, that would be most excellent.

- Ian

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Sean OMeara < "> > wrote:

Ian,

You can set arbitrary attributes on nodes within recipes.

so, you can do something like this:

name "appserver-config-a"
description "appserver-config-a"
run_list [
 "recipe[fooservice::client]",
]

Then, in at the top of your cookbooks/fooservice/client.rb :

node.set[:fooservice][:client].

You can use that attribute from your nagios::server recipe to search for:

fooservice_clients = search(:node, "fooservice_client:true")

You have now effectively searched for nodes with the fooservice
cookbook installed.

-s

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Ian Marlier < "> > wrote:
> Hi there, list --
>
> I'm trying to figure out a way to do a (relatively) dynamic include_recipe
> command.  Specifically, the context of this question is a Nagios server, and
> building the service definition files.
>
> I would like to be able to do the following:
>     - Get a list of all cookbooks defined in the chef server
>     - For each cookbook C, see if that cookbook includes a recipe called
> "nagios"
>     - If the cookbook does include a recipe called "nagios", then do
> include_recipe "#{C}::nagios"
>
> The idea is that when someone within my organization wants to add a chef
> cookbook to install/configure a new service or a new application, they can
> add the monitoring for that service/application as well -- without having to
> alter the nagios cookbook.
>
> I had sort of assumed that I could do this using search(), but it looks like
> cookbooks/recipes aren't searchable.  Sadness.  So I'm wondering if anyone
> has suggestions for other ways to make this happen.
>
> (I know that one potential issue is the requirement that metadata.rb also be
> updated.  I'm not entirely sure how to deal with that, either.  I figured I
> would worry about one problem at a time...)
>
> Thanks!
>
> - Ian
>