[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: passing attributes during runtime

[Ameya Savale < >]

Hi Ranjib,

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Ranjib Dey < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

-j expects a json file or a url pointing the json file. For an example of how to specify different attribute, you can get a node back as json

knife node show foo -Fj > foo.json

read foo.json, and see how attributes, environments, run list etc are specified. -j expects a file with similar structure.

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Ameya Savale < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi Ranjib,

So you were able to pass in attributes using the -j option like so:

chef-client -j {"key":"value"}

- Thanks

Ameya

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 10:40 AM, Ranjib Dey < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

you can invoke chef-client with -j option to pass custom attributes (including the run list). This is the exact mechanism using which chef bootstraps (install chef and other stuff on a virgin server). If you dont want the converged node state to be saved back to the chef server, you can use run list override (-o) option.

I have used same workflows to setup development and other type of instances where I want to reuse my chef scripts but dont want the target chef server to be under chef server, or actively managed (one time setup).

cheers

ranjib 

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Ameya Ameya Savale < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi Guys,

I had a question, which I couldn't seem to find an answer for in earlier posts.
I might have been searching the wrong keywords, but here it is. Is it possible
to run the chef-client command and pass in custom attributes inline. I need to
write a recipe which takes in a name and a port number and creates certain
directories and files and setups up configuration on the host using the name
and the port number.

I recently started using chef so everything is quite new to me. I read in
multiple places that you can do it using a json file. If I understood it
correctly then it seems I would need to create a separate json file for every
different name and post number that I want to pass in or update the same json
file before running the recipe with the new name and port, this seems very
tedious.

What would be the correct way of approaching this problem?

- Thanks
Ameya