[chef] Problems with Tomcat cookbook

[Stefán Freyr Stefánsson < >]

Hi.

We're using the Tomcat cookbook which is stored in the opscode github account.

Well, actually we are using our own fork of that in which we've applied some of the numerous outstanding pull requests.

So this brings me to my question. It seems that the Opscode Tomcat cookbook (https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/tomcat) isn't getting a lot of attention. It has 33 open pull requests, some of which make perfect sense (at least to me) but they don't even have a comment on them regarding whether they'll get merged or not.

There is still _some_ activity. A pull request was merged a month ago so it's not totally dead.

I also found an email on this list from last August about an organized hack session (http://lists.opscode.com/sympa/arc/chef/2014-08/msg00026.html) although it has no replies and I don't know what came out of that.

Right now we're working on setting up a non-standard instance of tomcat through this recipe and it's not really going great.

I've set the default["tomcat"]["run_base_instance"] attribute to false and I've added a block with our own Tomcat instance. However, the recipe fails when trying to configure Tomcat with the following error:

           ================================================================================

           Error executing action `create` on resource 'link[/usr/share/tomcat/bin]'

           ================================================================================

           

           Errno::EISDIR

           -------------

           Is a directory - /usr/share/tomcat/bin

           

           Resource Declaration:

           ---------------------

           # In /tmp/kitchen/cookbooks/tomcat/providers/instance.rb

           

            74:       link "#{new_resource.base}/#{dir}" do

            75:         to "#{node['tomcat']['base']}/#{dir}"

            76:       end

            77:     end

           

           Compiled Resource:

           ------------------

           # Declared in /tmp/kitchen/cookbooks/tomcat/providers/instance.rb:74:in `block (2 levels) in class_from_file'

           

           link("/usr/share/tomcat/bin") do

             provider Chef::Provider::Link

             action :create

             retries 0

             retry_delay 2

             guard_interpreter :default

             to "/usr/share/tomcat/bin"

             link_type :symbolic

             target_file "/usr/share/tomcat/bin"

             cookbook_name :tomcat

           end

           

​It looks like the cookbook is trying to create a link (/usr/share/tomcat/bin) which points to itself. Not only that, but the location already exists as a directory so even if it were pointing to something that made sense, it wouldn't be able to create it as it already exists.

I'll try to create a self-contained example demonstrating the problem using Test Kitchen, but in the meantime, if anybody knows what's going on here I'd appreciate any help with this.

-Stefan Freyr.