[chef] Need cfengine like copy to achieve Self Healing

["Steve Caissie" < >]

I’m trying to make my systems self healing with chef. I’ve been doing this for many years with cfengine. I think chef needs a cfengine like copy resource to make it easier to maintain a self healing environment.

 

In cfengine 2, the copy action has a recursive option that lets you preserve permissions and create classes if files were changed.  There doesn’t appear to be any resource to do this in chef.  You could use a tar file to preserve permissions, but then the copy isn’t idempotent.  There would be no easy way to tell if files on the destination system have changed.  You could put the files into a package like an rpm, but those packages are more difficult to maintain.  I have a lot of directories that I need to copy and maintain.  I don’t want to create an rpm for every directory.

 

It would also be nice if chef didn’t have to import all of the files you want to copy.  I’d like to be able to change a directory tree without having to tell Chef about the change.

 

To get around this limitation, I’m going to try to create an “rsync” LWRP in chef.

 

Steve Caissie
Director of Operations

Vlingo

 

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