[chef] Preferred Attribute locations

[Dylan Northrup < >]

At my day job, we're having a discussion on the proper location for attributes and it was suggested to ask the question on this list to see what the community has to say.

The assertion initially made was to not use attributes at the Environment level (since there's one and only one Environment per node it is a limiting place to put attributes).  The questions that came up from this assertion were as follows:

- At what level should attributes be set?   

- At the file, role or node level?  

- Does it matter if we're using default, normal/set or override for setting the attributes (other than for precedence's sake)?  

- Also, does the answer change depending on what the particular attribute is?  

- Is there a logical set of attributes that should be defaulted at the role level and overridden at the file level?  

- Or is the usage wide open with the exception of using attributes at the environment level?

Looking at several cookbooks, it appears most cookbooks that have attributes have "default" attributes (with exceptions being relatively old ones).  Also, role attributes tend to be "override" attributes.  Is this what can be considered "best practice"? Are there cases where this approach is not the preferred approach?

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Dylan