[chef] Re: Data bags as JSON files in subdirectory structure

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Russell Bateman wrote:

I'm a little confused by the examples I see of data bags, in http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_data_bags.html and elsewhere.

I keep all my Chef stuff in a filesystem (and Git) thus:

cookbooks
nodes
roles

This has all be working very well. Growing up to be man in Chef and learning data bags, I plan to add to this

data_bags
    admins
        charlie.json

...and not

data_bags
    _admins
        _charlie.json

I see some mention of substructure in the doc, but it's confusing; sometimes subdirectories and filenames are prefixed with an underscore while there's no mention of it in the outer discussion, such as the following command, but I wish to avoid underscores unless significant or best practice. Examples of telling my Chef server about this data bag tend to suggest using

knife data bag from file admins data_bags/admins/charlie.json

This is the path in my filesystem, which I commit to Git. Am I missing something here?

Many thanks!

Looks like it's a doc bug. I haven't seen anyone use underscores for data bag/item names anywhere and it's certainly not a requirement. Some people advocate using leading underscores to indicate that things like recipes are "private" (i.e., you shouldn't put it in a run_list or call include_recipe) but off the top of my head I'm not even sure what it means for a data bag to be "private".

I'll ping our doc writer about this.

-- 

Daniel DeLeo