[chef] Deleting nodes/clients using chef-client or chef-shell

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Hello all,

I am currently using autoscaling on AWS combined with an init script (https://github.com/ameir/chef-initstrap) to bootstrap nodes.  So far, it's been working great.

One thing I'd like to do, though, is be able to delete the corresponding node/client from the Chef server on an instance termination.  For autoscaled instances, I can put some meat in the stop action of the script to perform the deletion, but neither chef-shell nor chef-client appear to support such a method.

I just realized through some testing (while writing this email) that I can use knife from the servers like:

knife node delete `hostname -f` -c /etc/chef/client.rb

knife client delete `hostname -f` -c /etc/chef/client.rb

Would this be the preferred approach?  I'm sure this is common enough of a problem.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ameir