[chef] Looping in chef

[Guy Matz < >]

Ladles & Jellyspoons,

Hello!  I have to create a password file for proftpd and am feeling ambivalent about how to go about it, was hoping someone might help . . .

Proftpd needs to have an olde style passwd file (hashed/crypted passwords included) to authenticate against.  I am currently getting the usernames & passwords from a data bag and looping through them, checking my password file to see if they exist and adding if they don't.  A helper method within a library file is actually doing the work, and I'm wondering if rather than passing the users to the method one-by-one, if I could be passing the entire data structure . . .  it doesn't sound like a big difference, but passing the entire struct back to the helper would make things a log easier.  It doesn't seem like the chef way, though.  But I'm very new to the chef way.

Puppet had a prased_file provider that made this sort of thing easier, but this doesn't seem to exist in chef.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Guy