[chef] Best practice to declare an attribute that must be defined outside the cookbook?

[Stephen Corbesero < >]

What is the best way to declare an attribute in attributes/default.rb which is really expected to be defined at a higher level, say an environment or even a wrapper cookbook?  I am reluctant to give it a default value, since  it is too easy to forget to change it when a cookbook gets deployed.  In the past we have used entries like “invalid” if it is a string, or an illegal number based on the context.

 

Should I just go all the way and use ‘nil’?  As well as adding an explicit check in the recipe to look for the undefined value and log a descriptive message?

 

 

 

--

Stephen Corbesero, DevOps Engineer

Synchronoss - Mobile Innovation for a Connected World

Office: +1 484-821-4272

| www.synchronoss.com