[chef] Re: Re: What is a simple method to arrange e-mail notification of failed convergence?

[AJ Christensen < >]

Yo,

All of the suggestions are trivial, less than 5 minutes of work. It's
your relative knowledge ("Chef skill") with regard to the ecosystem
that makes them seem "complicated". I've heard this a lot recently,
but you're the first I'm going to call out on it.

I would probably suggest not being so aggressive in your replies to
the mailing list. Building a chef handler is simple. Building one that
shells to 'mail' with a pipe is simple as well. It is not complicated.
@kallistec took the time to respond rapidly to your question with a
handler that @kisoku had already built for you. Many of us build this
software for a living.

I would add a recommendation for using the Pony gem. It looks like
@kisoku's chef-handler-mail software supports a custom template for
emailing, which is something you'd end up doing eventually anyway: I
bet you'll want to send data based on the converge itself (updated
resources, which resources, updated resources of a certain type, run
length info, blah blah.)

The "half day of dependency hell" to which you so promptly refer is
solved with a few Chef resources in a cookbook, probably designed for
installing the email handler:

```

chef_gem 'chef-handler-mail'
require 'chef/handler/mail'

chef_handler 'MailHandler' do
   source 'chef/handler/mail'
   arguments :to_address => "root"
   action :nothing
end.run_action(:enable)
```

The dependency on 'pony' is handled through the chef_gem installation
of chef-handler-mail. There are no additional deps. [0]

Please, do the needful.

cheers,

--aj

[0]  https://rubygems.org/gems/chef-handler-mail

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 7:54 AM, Phil Mocek 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Daniel DeLeo wrote:
>> there are already ones written that do what you’re asking, like
>> this one: https://github.com/kisoku/chef-handler-mail
>
> That's not quite what I'm asking, which is for a simple method to
> configure chef-client to send an e-mail to a particular address if
> convergence fails.  Apparently, to use chef-handler-email, I need
> to install one or more gems on client systems (that sounds like a
> half-day of dependency hell), or use the provided LWRP in a recipe
> of my creation.  If that's the simplest way to get an e-mail from
> chef-client on failure, I'm disappointed, and concerned that I
> have miscommunicated my goal.
>
>> A super simple example is provided in the docs you linked:
>> https://docs.getchef.com/essentials_handlers.html#syntax if you
>> just want to copy pasta that code.
>
> That appears to be a simple example *of how to write a custom
> handler*.  I do not want to write a custom handler.  All I really
> need to customize is the e-mail address to which notifications
> should be sent, like cron's MAILTO setting.
>
>> If you’re interested in other community-contributed handlers,
>> there’s a list at the bottom of the documentation page:
>> https://docs.getchef.com/essentials_handlers.html#community-handlers
>
> That is preferable to writing my own handler.  It still appears to
> require writing a recipe.  I'm busy writing recipes to deploy and
> configure software and virtual infrastructure.  I just want to
> tell chef-client to send an e-mail when it fails.
>
>> Also, there is a chef_handler cookbook that will manage handlers
>> for you, some documentation on that is here:
>> https://docs.getchef.com/resource_chef_handler.html ;(GH:
>> https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/chef_handler)
>
> That's also useful, and also far more complicated than I hoped it
> would be just to get chef-client to send an e-mail on failure.
>
> I feel like I must be missing something.  My goal, here, seems
> likely to be a common one, and Chef generally handles those well
> without much work on the user's part.
>
> Thanks for the suggestions, Daniel.  I suspect I will end up using
> some of what you referenced.
>
> --
> Phil Mocek
> https://mocek.org