[chef] Calling Notify from Within a Provider

[Alex Hewson < >]

Hi Chef Experts,

I'm working on a lightweight provider that should restart an external
service. However for some reason I’m finding it impossible to notify the
service from within the provider. One of the community modules -
supervisord - displays the issue but I’ve boiled it down to a simple
example for discussion here.

Let’s say we have a cookbook called provider_resource_test.

We have a default recipe:

#
# Cookbook Name:: provider_resource_test
# Recipe:: default
#
# Copyright 2014, Picsolve Ltd.
#
# All rights reserved - Do Not Redistribute
#

service "my-service-name”


…and a resource

actions :create, :delete

attribute :name, :kind_of => String, :name_attribute => true

def initialize(*args)
super
@action = :create
end


…and a lightweight provider:

use_inline_resources

action :create do
directory "/tmp/dir_#{new_resource.name}" do
notifies :reload, "service[my-service-name]"
end
end

action :delete do
# nothing required
end



Finally I define a simple recipe that will use the resource:

#
# Cookbook Name:: provider_resource_test
# Recipe:: use_it
#
# Copyright 2014, Picsolve Ltd.
#
# All rights reserved - Do Not Redistribute
#


provider_resource_test_thing “an_instance_of_thing"



I try to instantiate this on a node by setting the following json
attributes:



 :~#
 cat /etc/chef/attribs.json
{
"run_list": ["recipe[provider_resource_test]",
"recipe[provider_resource_test::use_it]"]
}


I do a chef-client run and it invariably bails out with the following error:

[2014-03-19T16:41:28+00:00] ERROR:
provider_resource_test_thing[an_instance_of_thing]
(provider_resource_test::use_it line 11) had an error:
Chef::Exceptions::ResourceNotFound: resource
directory[/tmp/dir_an_instance_of_thing] is configured to notify
resource service[my-service-name] with action reload, but
service[my-service-name] cannot be found in the resource collection.
directory[/tmp/dir_an_instance_of_thing] is defined in
/var/chef/cache/cookbooks/provider_resource_test/providers/thing.rb:4:in
`block in class_from_file'

I have tried specifying the service directly with:

notifies :reload, "service[my-service-name]"

...and also by trying to resolve it with a resource() call.

Needless to say use_inline_resources is present at the top of the
provider file though I've tried without it as well.

I'm running chef-client 11.10.4 and a similarly recent Chef server. I
can post debug output from the chef-client run if it's wanted, just
don't want to spam the list on my first post.

I've been stumped with this for days so I'd very much appreciate some
advice: why can’t I notify a service from within a provider?


-- 
Alex Hewson

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