[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How to override node attribute with lazy value?

[Lamont Granquist < >]

On Fri Oct  3 16:39:36 2014, Lamont Granquist wrote:
> How it should be written, i'll look at submitting a PR...

Sorry look like I fell victim to thinking that all problems were like 
my last problem.

The hostname is getting set at converge time, fairly late, by the 
hostname cookbook.  Your node['fqdn'] will be the old hostname 
throughout the whole compile phase of the chef-client run.  In your 
case since you control the code it'll be way easier to use the 
node['set_fqdn'] attribute that you're passing to the hostname cookbook 
to pass to the
chef-server cookbook:

node.override["chef-server"]["configuration"]["nginx"]["ssl_certificate"] 
= "/etc/pki/tls/certs/#{node['set_fqdn']}.pem"

If that doesn't work for you then you may have an issue trying to do 
that.  The attributes are most likely getting passed into the template 
variable sometime in compiletime and your node['fqdn'] isn't getting 
updated until converge time.   Either the hostname cookbook needs to be 
changed to do its work at compile-time or else the chef-server cookbook 
needs to be converted to be lazy.

A better approach would probably be for the hostname cookbook to expose 
a ruby library to call to get the desired hostname (basically sugar 
around either returning node['set_fqdn'] or else returning the output 
of "/usr/sbin/vmtoolsd --cmd 'info-get guestinfo.hostname'") and then 
you could get that value at compile time and set attributes with it 
just fine.