[chef] best way to run something only once?

[Tomasz Chmielewski < >]

Does chef have some built-in way to run some recipes (or parts of it)
once only?

Say, I have the following (here, bash snippet, but could be anything):

bash 'adjust-supervisor' do
  code <<-EOF
     ...some_code...
  EOF
end


How would you approach to make sure it only runs once?

I figured I could use something like this in the recipe:

   not_if { ::File.exists?("/etc/chef/stamps/some-description.stamp") }

followed by:

file "/etc/chef/stamps/some-description.stamp" do
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode "0644"
  action :create
end


It allows me to easily re-run by removing the stamp file, if needed.


But not sure it's the optimal way to make sure we run a given thing
once.

How do you approach this?




-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://www.sslrack.com