[chef] getting started, where do I put the data

[David Morton < >]

I have a few basic recipes started, and can deploy them to a vagrant 
server, using chef server.    It's a steep learning curve, but I think 
I'm getting it figured out. :)

I now need to plan where the domain attributes live.  Thanks for helping 
out a chef newbie!

For now, I'm looking at many rails projects, staging and production 
environments, and various nodes they may live on.  My question is, where 
is the best place to store the mapping of these combinations?   node 
attributes?  data bags?   I need to be able to say:

project: foo, environment: staging, node: node1
project: foo, environment: production, node: node2  (additional 
attributes like sendgrid pw)

project: bar, environment: staging, node: node1 (additional attributes, 
delayed job)
project: bar, environment: production, node: node3  (additional 
attributes delayed job)

and so on.   I can see how the recipes can look for these attributes and 
take action on them...   But it's not clear where to put them. I want it 
in my git repo though, so we can track the changes over time. right?

At one point I thought the node was the place, but in researching I'm 
not clear if knife node from file is safe -  it loked like that replaced 
the node?

Data bags could do it, although I got the impression the were for 
credentials, not the whole configuration.  What is the convention here?

Also, I don't see much information on how to handle removal - lets say 
project foo above is terminated.   Just deleting it from the node or 
data bag is not enough.  do I need to make a special slot for removals, 
and have the recipe update the attribute when it has removed it?


--
David Morton