[chef] Re: The Application Cookbook Pattern vs. String / Node Attribute Interpolation in Attributes files

[Noah Kantrowitz < >]

The usual way to fix this is to put the attribute override in your cookbook's 
attribute file and then force Chef to re-execute the java cookbook attributes 
file. Unfortunately that snippet is in a ticket so I can't get to it right 
now.

--Noah

On Aug 5, 2013, at 9:56 AM, Torben Knerr 
<
 >
 wrote:

> 
> Ohai Chefs,
> 
> given an application cookbook trying to installing Java 7:
> 
> ```sample-app/recipes/default.rb
> node.set['java']['jdk_version'] = "7"
> include_recipe "java"
> ```
> 
> It will always install Java version 6 because the node attributes from the 
> Java cookbook have already been interpolated when the sample-app recipe is 
> evaluated:
> 
> ```java/attributes/default.rb
> ...
> default['java']['jdk_version'] = '6'
> ...
> when "debian"
>   ...
>   default['java']['openjdk_packages'] = 
> ["openjdk-#{node['java']['jdk_version']}-jdk", "default-jre-headless"]
> ...
> ```
> 
> The only way to "correctly" pass in the java/jdk_version attribute is from 
> external, e.g. via environment files or dna.json etc... That works, but 
> actually I consider the JDK version an implementation detail of the 
> application cookbook and don't want to expose it via the above files.
> 
> How can you deal with that? 
> 
> Is there a possibility to re-evaluate the attributes file before you 
> `include_recipe` it? And would this be a good idea at all?!?
> 
> Any ideas or workarounds?
> 
> Cheers,
> Torben