[chef] Re: ActiveMQ cookbook needs to rev to 5.5.1

[Joshua Timberman < >]

Hello!

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 8:58 AM, Edward Sargisson 
<
 >
 wrote:
> The mirror no longer has 5.5.0 so the activemq cookbook fails to
> download it - hence the cookbook fails.
>
> This caused me an outage this morning. :-(

You can set the version to download as an attribute. For example in an
"activemq-broker" role:

name "activemq-broker"
description "Servers that provide ActiveMQ"
run_list("recipe[activemq]")
default_attributes(
  "activemq" => {
    "version" => "5.5.1"
  }
)

Chef will use the value from the role over the value in the cookbook's
attributes file when it runs.

> Idea:
> Would there be a way to write the cookbooks so they grab their
> external downloads and stash them in a repository.
> Then normal operation would get them from the repository.

That is outside the purview of Chef and cookbooks.

However it is totally reasonable to write a cookbook that sets up a
yum repository for you. I wouldn't do the download/sync of packages in
such a cookbook as that can take a long time depending on your
connection (and what packages you're downloading). I wrote our
reprepro cookbook for that purpose for Debian/Ubuntu systems.

-- 
Opscode, Inc
Joshua Timberman, Technical Program Manager
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman