[chef] Attributes and definitions aren't loaded when running cookbook

[Norbert Hartl < >]

Hi,

this is my first mail to this list. I asked the following question also on stackoverflow but thought this list might be the better destination for it. The question on stackoverflow is http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17490736/chef-does-not-read-attributes-and-definitions

Anyway here it comes again:

I have a an old project I've built with chef (https://github.com/noha/virtual-gemstone). It uses chef together with vagrant to achieve its goal. The project was stale for the last couple of months and now I want to reactivate it. But I don't have much luck running it with chef 11. No matter what I try the values in attributes/default.rb aren't there. In the gemstone/attributes/default.rb file I have

default[:gemstone][:base_url] =   "http://glass-downloads.gemstone.com/gss24"

default[:gemstone][:version] =   "GemStone64Bit2.4.4.1-x86_64.Linux"

default[:gemstone][:dir] =       "/opt/gemstone"

default[:gemstone][:log_dir] =   "/opt/gemstone/log"

default[:gemstone][:lock_dir] =  "/opt/gemstone/locks"

default[:gemstone][:user] =      "gemstone"

default[:gemstone][:no_gems] = 3

default[:gemstone][:low_port] = 7000

default[:gemstone][:cache_path] = Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]

and in the gemstone/recipes/base.rb I have

...

tmp = node[:gemstone][:cache_path]

base_url = "#{node[:gemstone][:base_url]}"

file = "#{node[:gemstone][:version]}.zip"

dir = "#{node[:gemstone][:dir]}/#{node[:gemstone][:version]}"

...

but the values are always undefined/empty. I've tried even to set node.default in the attributes file and also while accessing the values in the recipe.

In order to test it I've copied all recipe .rb files into a single default.rb and added the content from the attributes file. This works but no it complains about a missing function that I've defined in gemstone/definitions/monit.rb called monit_gem.

The whole project was working months before. So I think there is something fundamentally wrong with my current setup for chef 11. But I couldn't find much that needs to be tweaked for this in order to work properly.

I've run chef-solo on my linux box with debugging on and I could see that for the first recipe (the one in the run_list) it loads an attributes file but not for any of the following. Putting all desired config values in the attributes file of the first recipe makes them available in the following recipes (although this kind of setup is not wanted). And it stops at the definition problem.

Any ideas?

thanks,

Norbert