[chef] Forcing chef-client to run via API?

[Dane Elwell < >]

Hi there,

I'm wondering if it's possible to force the Chef client to run on a 
node from an API call?

I'm building a fairly large configuration file using data from a 
databag. The databag is updated by a client-facing external application 
using the Chef server API, at which point I'd ideally like to force a 
chef-client run in order to rebuild the configuration on the server. The 
reason for this is primarily to keep end-users happy, as I'm not sure 
they would be happy making a configuration change and having to wait 30 
minutes for the next convergence. FWIW I'm using the chef-client 
cookbook.

I know this can be done using `knife ssh`, but I was hoping for 
something built-in that can handle this via a RESTful API call.

If nothing exists I'll write some kind of wrapper around knife ssh, but 
doing things like that always feels wrong to me! (Probably because I'm 
trying to make Chef do something it wasn't designed for ;)

Thanks

Dane