[chef] Re: Re: When is it necessary to use include_attribute?

[Christopher Armstrong < >]

Thanks Dan.

So, if I depend on a cookbook in my metadata.rb, I can trust that its attributes are parsed before Chef gets to my cookbook's attributes?

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Daniel DeLeo < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

On Thursday, March 27, 2014 at 10:01 AM, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> Ohai Chefs,
>
> Say I have a cookbook bar. This cookbook depends on a cookbook foo. I have included foo as a dependency in my metadata.rb and I'm doing an include_recipe "foo" in bar's default recipe. Groovy.
>
> I need to override a few of foo's default attributes in bar. So, in bar's attributes.rb, I override these attributes.
>
> Now my question: ordinarily, I would include_attributes "foo" in bar before I override these attributes, as alphabetically foo comes after bar, and I want to ensure that those attributes are parsed before I override them.
>
> That's how I've been doing things. Today, though, I'm wondering if that's even necessary, because I have listed foo as a dependency in bar's metadata. Does Chef's dependency resolver parse default attributes for all dependencies before getting to a cookbook's own attributes?
>
> Hope that makes sense!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chris

In Chef 10 it was a total mess, so we’ll skip that. But if you are still using 10.x then include attribute is definitely needed to have any semblance of sanity.

In Chef 11, cookbooks get ordered based on dependencies, and then within a cookbook, default.rb gets loaded first and then it’s lexical (alphabetical, more or less) sort order after that.

If you run with -ldebug, you should see log messages for your include_attributes statements that say whether they’re no-ops or not.


--
Daniel DeLeo