[chef] Re: Manage role-node association with scm?

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Aug 8, 2013, at 8:33 AM, Tommaso Visconti 
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 wrote:

> knife node run_list add <mynode> "role[cool_role]"
> 
> but this doesn't leave any trace in the chef-repo files, so it's impossible 
> to save the associations in the SCM.
> Is it possible to use ruby/json files to manage the nodes' roles? Or the 
> only ways are knife and the chef-server web interface?

Well, "knife role from file" will get you the roles themselves stored in a 
format that you can check into the SCM, but that doesn't help with the 
information about the nodes and what roles have been applied to them.

What I've done in the past is to do a "knife node edit" any time I wanted to 
add a role or delete a role from a node, or otherwise make changes to the 
runlist on a node.  But you're right that this information isn't checked into 
an SCM anywhere.  You could dump the information from a "knife node show 
nodename -l" into a file format that could be checked into an SCM, but most 
of the information will be auto-discovered by ohai, and you really want to 
let ohai do the job you're asking it to do.


For my part, I considered this information about the node itself to be fairly 
ephemeral, and the information available from the Chef database regarding the 
roles, runlists, and other details about a node has been sufficient.  So long 
as Chef keeps track of what is applied to what node, I haven't really cared.

> I tried to solve the problem reading the docs, but they are really a lot 
> and I didn't find anything useful for this :|

The search interface on docs.opscode.com is decent, but it definitely has 
limits.  If you know a keyword or two, that's usually enough to get you to a 
set of pages, one of which is likely to have information that leads you to an 
answer for your question.  But if you don't know what you're looking for, or 
it's more specific than can be crammed into just a keyword or two, then 
you're less likely to be successful.

--
Brad Knowles 
<
 >
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>