[chef] Set chef environment at initialization of node

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Hi all,

This has probably been addressed already, but I can't find it in the archive
(since the word "environment" means so many different things). I want to set 
my
chef environment at node instantiation. I currently use "knife ec2 server
create ..." to bootstrap the ec2 instance with centos6-gems.

I have two different environments, "staging" and "production", and I want to
make sure that production doesn't get newer versions of the cookbooks until
they've been qualified in staging. Is there a straightforward way of
accomplishing this?

I have tried setting knife.rb
knife[:environment] = "production"

and I even tried adding to client.rb in the bootstrap:
environment "production"

But neither of these worked.  Any thoughts?

Thank you!
Vincent