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Asked: 2012-06-22 03:40:09 +0800 CST

Return from Chef recipe without rising an exception

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Is there a way to return from Chef recipe without rising an exception?

Say I have a long recipe. I want to add a ruby block to it's beginning which will check some condition (for example directory presence) and stop processing this recipe (but continue to execute the rest of run_list) without raising an exception if condition succeeds.

Conditional execution (only_if/not_if) doesn't solve the problem because I have to add the condition to every resource call in the recipe while there may be very many of them.

There is a comment in Opscode's wiki where the commenter asks about the same but no answer.

deployment configuration-management chef

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The way to abort run of a recipe (e.g. due to some condition) is to use a 'return' statement. A thorough discussion appears in jtimberman's answer to a parallel StackOverflow question.

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  2. I would break up that recipe into two pieces and use include_recipe inside an if statement. For example in cookbooks/foo/default.rb:

    some_condition = File.exists?("/etc/whatever") # Your specific check here

if some_condition
    include_recipe "foo::conditional_bit"
end

    Put your conditional recipe in cookbooks/foo/recipes/conditional_bit.rb and add recipe[foo] to the appropriate node's run list.

    Note that the order of execution will be slightly different to if you had specified a ruby block. The condition will be checked during the "compile" phase of the chef-client run, not the "execute" phase. See the Anatomy of a Chef Run page for details.

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