[chef] Re: First-run Resources

[Jeppe Nejsum Madsen < >]

<
 >
 writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm creating a cookbook for deploying an application server (jruby & tomcat)
> and  database server (postgres).
>
> There is a "rake db:setup" command that I need to run only once to set up 
> the 
> database structure. I wanted to do this with the "first run resource" 
> pattern
> (http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_cookbook_resources_first_run.html) but
> since the app server from which I run the rake command is a chef different 
> node
> than the database server, it doesn't have permission to set an attribute on 
> it.
>
> I'm able to manually give this permission from the hosted chef UI but I'm
> looking at a way to grant this permission from my database server's recipe.
>
> Any idea how I can do this? Or maybe a better way to store this flag? (Btw I
> have one database server and possibly multiple app servers in each
> environment).

I think a better approach is to check if the db:setup tasks needs to be
run on the box by check e.g. the database. We do something like this:

execute "add-#{database}-database" do
    command %Q{
                su - postgres -c "createdb -E=UTF8 --template=template0 -O 
#{node[:postgresql][:dba_user]} #{database}"
    }

    not_if "su - postgres -c \"psql -c \\\"SELECT * FROM pg_database\\\"\" | 
grep #{database}"
end

/Jeppe