[chef] One-Shot runlists with inheritance

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We have run into an interesting problem. We want to segregate runlists by
activity (e.g infrastructure maintenance, deployment, one-off, etc…). But we
want all the runlists to share some common role information about a node. We
have a node that has some roles (datacenter, servergroup, tier) that are
important identifiers and drive selection of certain attributes. We want
different groups to be able to do maintenance on their parts at different 
times
without impacting others. So if a sysadmin wants to update /etc/hosts he
shouldn’t have to worry if the application team has put in a new attribute
for a deployment later. The sysadmin can run a runlist that only affects the
parts of the system he is responsible for without worrying that an application
deployment recipe will run. Conversely in a software deployment the deployment
team should be able to update the applications without updating the operating
system (given the os changes are not part of the software deployment).

I thought “chef-client -j” would do this, but it didn’t. This is what I
did: I created a node and bootstrapped it with a runlist of its identity 
roles.
I then made a json file with a  runlist for a set of activity and ran the
runlist via “chef-client -j <jsonfile>”. The problem is that the runlist
for the node that existed before chef-client gets wiped out and only the
runlist in the json file gets run thus wiping out its “identity” and
breaking the one-off runlist because certain attributes no longer exist.

I’d like to be able to append a runlist on the fly to an existing runlist on
the node where the new runlist exists on the node only for the duration of the
chef-client run. The node has a “base” runlist that should always be run,
but I want to run some other recipes and roles one at a time while keeping the
“base” runlist. I do not want to have to copy the base runlist into the
json file of the one-shot runlist that I am running as I’m trying to keep the
“activity” runlists environment independent. 

Is there a way to run a one-off runlist on a node that is effectively appended
to the runlist that is already on the node and is removed after the run?

Thanks,

Dan