[chef] Re: Scoping data bag items to environments

[Jesse Nelson < >]

our hack has been to use a lookup for environment (this was pre 
chef-environments) and chefs DeepMerge to basically get us environment bag 
items that could be merged into a default bag item:

bags = data_bag( :jboss )
conf =  data_bag_item( :jboss, node.jboss.cluster )['jboss']
if bags.include?( cluster_env )
  conf = Chef::Mixin::DeepMerge.merge( conf, data_bag_item( :jboss, 
cluster_env )['jboss'] )
end


so in jboss bag we have  cluster1 and cluster1-dev    which will override 
cluster1 default bag item.  

This has served us well. 


On Aug 16, 2011, at 4:46 PM, Charles Duffy wrote:

> Howdy --
> 
> Is there any support, either in code or by convention, for scoping data bag 
> items to environments?
> 
> Presuming that no explicit support exists (which is my current working 
> understanding), I've been thinking about appending the current environment 
> to the bag name for any data bags which are environment-specific. This 
> would seem like an advantage over putting the target environment in the bag 
> item name or in the JSON object's contents, by preventing the need for Chef 
> code to consider and explicitly exclude items not local to the active 
> environment.
> 
> Have others given thought to this subject?
> 
> Thanks!