[chef] read-only access to data in the chef-repository

[Bryan Berry < >]

Dear Chefs,

I have a question about how to programmatically get read access to the data in the chef-repository

We are a java-heavy shop, which mean than configuration gets baked into software in two places, on our jenkins CI server during the .war build process and on the target node as well.

I intend to store all the application configuration details in Chef databags, details like:

target database server:

database auth credentials

clustering info

http port

https port

other ports

I intend to create maven target that grabs such information from the chef server

I found that I can get read-only access from any server that is a chef-client

$ knife search jboss_apps "type:production" -c /etc/chef/client.rb -F json

I had to add one value to client.rb    to get the above to work

node_name   'foo.example.com'

I would love to know how to do this with pure ruby. Any ideas?

I need to query the chef-server, grab a bunch of values, then throw them into jboss-foo.xml.erb template and compile that template. If you fellow Chefs see any issues w/ this approach, pls let me know :)