[chef] Re: Re: Searching files/ to see if file exists

[Julio Lajara < >]

I was thinking about how I could detect if a required file was bundled 
with the cookbook under cookbook/files/{default,<platform>,<host>} or 
otherwise fallback to trying to download it from a remote source.

In terms of a particular package I wanted to be able to see if the node 
compatible installer was already in cookbookfiles/* (as some of my 
customers like bundling packages in with the cookbook in cases where 
external net access on box isnt available) and get its path to use as a 
source for the package resource. I figured get_filename would be able to 
give me that path if it existed but not sure.

After thinking about it more (given that its not a good idea to put 
large files in git anyway), im thinking of just doing this all through 
attributes instead and force providing a source path in the case of 
local files (not caring about how to actually get them onto the server 
for now unless they provide a remote_file compatible source url).

On 05/02/2014 04:27 PM, Lamont Granquist wrote:
> On 5/2/14, 9:20 AM, Julio Lajara wrote:
> > Hi all, I need to determine if a file is included/exists in the 
> > files/* subdir under any appropriate folder for the current node, is 
> > there any way I can do this? I looked through the chef code and see 
> > theres a get_filename method as part of the cookbook code, is this 
> > usable from within cookbooks and if so can someone point to an 
> > example of how it would be used?
> >
> > Thanks,
> It might be better to know exactly what you're trying to accomplish in 
> context.  You're going to run into lazy cookbook loading issues almost 
> right away and in general the solution you're heading towards is 
> likely to be fairly brittle.  There might be a better way to solve the 
> bigger problem that you're trying to solve that doesn't go down this 
> hole.  And if there isn't a better way to solve the bigger problem 
> then there might be better helper methods to engineer and give to you 
> to make it easier to do things like this...