Chef

Logging

Writing this on your recipe will result in log message appearing during the provider execution phase.

log 'test' do
  level :info
end

While this will result in the message appearing during resource gathering stage of the chef run.

Chef::Log.info("Connection to database '#{dbname}' on '#{host}' failed")

You can set the log level of your chef run by setting the -l flag.

chef-client -l info

Debugging Chef Solo

The stacktrace can be seen at:

~/chef-solo/local-mode-cache/cache/chef-stacktrace.out

Modify cookbook on the node directly and apply it (useful when testing)

Modify cookbook(s) on /var/chef/cache/cookbooks.

Then run chef using --skip-cookbook-sync parameter.

Uploading Cookbook

1. Don’t forget to bump the version if cookbook is updated
2. Put cookbook that you want to upload in cookbooks directory
3. knife cookbook upload <cookbook-name>

Editing Attributes on Chef Server

knife node show -Fj p-node-01 > p-node-01.json

# Edit the p-node-01.json file
knife node from file p-node-01.json

Useful knife commands

# Search nodes by tag
knife search -i "tags:<tag>"

# Search nodes by runlist
knife search -i "run_list:<run_list>"

# Search nodes by runlist (with wildcard)
knife search -i "run_list:recipe\\[foo\\:\\:*\\]"

# Show a node attribute in json
knife node show <node-name> -F json

# Show a node attribute in json and fetch the tags using jq
knife node show <node-name> -F json  | jq '.normal.tags'

# Get a specific node attribute (e.g. ipaddress)
knife node show <node-name> -a ipaddress -Fj | jq '.[].ipaddress'

# Add runlist to a node
knife node run_list add <node-name> "recipe[foo]"

# SSH to a node and execute a command
knife ssh "name:<node-name>" 'sudo chef-client -o "recipe[foo]"' -x ubuntu -a ipaddress -i <private-key>

Running multiple specific recipes on a node

chef-client -o "recipe[recipe1],recipe[recipe2]"

Do something based on current node runlist

run_list = node.primary_runlist
if run_list.includes?('role[foo]')
  do_something
else
  do_something_else
end