[chef] Re: How Can I Run a recipe twice on the same machine with different settings for each invocation?

[Alex Soto < >]

Hey Tom,

You're explanation of the use case is a bit general that makes it hard to give specific advice.  Do you have a specific community recipe your are interested in using in that manner, or your own?

During the same run, the same recipe will only be run once, but each run could have different inputs to tweak things as needed.  You could use databags or node attributes.

I've got a 'similar' use case I've done for running multiple ruby active messaging pollers.  I'm using the monit cookbook with the monitrc LWRP so in hopes that it provides inspiration I put some snippets below:

In my recipe:

monitrc "pollers", {:processor_groups => node[:processor_groups], 

  :app_dir => "#{node[:channels][(node[:channels][:app_name])][:current_path]}",

  :rails_env => node[:channels][:environment],

  :alert_email => node[:monit][:notify_email]}

the erb template used:

<% @processor_groups.keys.each do |group| %>

  <% ( :num_pollers]).each do |i| %>

  <% poller_group_name = group.sub('group', '') %>

CHECK PROCESS <%= poller_group_name %>poller<%= i %> WITH PIDFILE <%= File.join(@app_dir, "tmp", "pids", "#{poller_group_name}poller#{i}.pid") %> EVERY 5 CYCLES

START PROGRAM = "/bin/su - channels -c 'cd <%= @app_dir %> ; RAILS_ENV=<%= @rails_env %> bundle exec  <%= @app_dir %>/script/poller <%=i%> start -- process-group=<%= group %>'" WITH TIMEOUT 300 seconds

STOP  PROGRAM = "/bin/su - channels -c 'cd <%= @app_dir %> ; RAILS_ENV=<%= @rails_env %> bundle exec <%= @app_dir %>/script/poller <%=i%> stop -- process-group=<%= group %>'"

  GROUP <%= group %>

GROUP messagebus

IF TOTALMEMORY > 250 MB FOR 10 CYCLES THEN restart

  #IF 3 RESTARTS WITHIN 5 CYCLES THEN timeout

  ALERT <%= @alert_email %> NOT {action, exec, nonexist, pid, ppid, resource}

  <% end %>

<% end %>

example of the node attributes:

      :processor_groups => {

        :affiliate_agent_group => { :num_pollers => 1 },

        :introspect_video_group => { :num_pollers => 1 },

        :publisher_agent_group => { :num_pollers => 1 },

        :show_agent_group => { :num_pollers => 2 },

        :transcode_group => { :num_pollers => 1},

        :update_rss_feed_group  => { :num_pollers => 1 },

        :video_available_group => { :num_pollers => 1 }

      }

On Oct 18, 2011, at 9:37 AM, Tom Duckering wrote:

Hi,

I'm wondering if it's possible to apply a recipe twice on the same machine with different settings.

The exact reason is that I have a build farm and each agent can only run a single job at a time. I'd therefore like to install more than one agent on each machine. Each agent needs slightly different settings so that they don't clash.

So I'd like to say, run the agent recipe passing it a parameter to say "agentId=1" and run it again with "agentId=2" and so on.

Thanks in advance.

Tom

--
Tom Duckering