[chef] Re: Help with vagrant-butcher and the Chef API

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Wednesday, December 26, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Cassiano Leal wrote:

Ohai Chefs,

I'm struggling to get vagrant-butcher [0] to work in my current setup. I'm not sure what has changed since last time, but it used to work just fine. (And I know that this last sentence isn't very helpful, but it's what I've got :)

I'm using the methods Chef::Node.load and Chef::ApiClient.load, with a subsequent destroy on the object [1].

Digging into the Chef source code, I found out that I can call Chef::Node.build [2] and then destroy, and it works fine.

The same cannot be said about ApiClient, which doesn't have a build method. For that, load should work, except it doesn't. The problem seems to be that it's trying to reference the client by a key 'clientname' [3], whereas I get a hash with a 'name' key instead [4].

Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong here, or if I should file bugs for Chef?

Also, if anyone had any success or failures in using the gem, I'd like to know as much as possible so that I can pinpoint where the issue might lie as well.

Thanks!

[0] https://github.com/cassianoleal/vagrant-butcher

[1] https://github.com/cassianoleal/vagrant-butcher/blob/master/lib/vagrant-butcher/cleanup.rb#L13-L14

[2] https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/10.16.4/chef/lib/chef/node.rb#L595-L600

[3] https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/10.16.4/chef/lib/chef/api_client.rb#L211

[4] https://gist.github.com/4381943

-- 

Cassiano Leal

Chef is relying on the json gem to "inflate" the response into an ApiClient object. Normally, the json gem looks at the "json_class" key and if that exists, will lookup the matching class and then call class_name.json_create(data) to return an object of the matching class. The json gem supports changing the magic key name via (e.g.) JSON.create_id = "not_json_class". If neither Node.load nor ApiClient.load are working correctly, then I'd try grepping the relevant source code for 'create_id=', to see if that's being disabled somewhere (maybe by vagrant?).

If you can't re-enable the 'json_class' stuff, then you can pass the hash responses you get into Node.json_create() and ApiClient.json_create() manually. Alternatively, you can just make a HTTP DELETE call to $base_url/clients/$name (and similar for nodes).

As I mentioned in a previous thread, we'd like to eliminate our reliance on the 'json_class' stuff, but it'll take a fair bit of work so it's not going to happen soon.

-- 

Daniel DeLeo