[chef] validation of attributes that can't have a sensible default

[Sölvi Páll Ásgeirsson < >]

Hello everyone

For some cookbook attributes, you can not set a sensible default.

What i'm doing now is setting the attribute defaults to nil and creating a _attribute_validation.rb recipe which is basically a sequence of:

unless foo[:attr] 

  Chef::Application.fatal! "foo[:attr] is unset.  Override with sane values of bar"

end

This is repetitive and boring.  Is there a smarter way of going about this which I'm missing?

Is there a way to do this directly from the attributes/*.rb ?

Thanks alot!

Sölvi Páll Á