upbeat.linux's questions

In Chef 10 I have a number of roles which set custom node attributes like

"appname": "my_rails_app"

The attribute is then used to load app specific variables in a wrapper cookbook. There are different variables and number of variables for each Rails app for example.

app = Chef::EncryptedDataBagItem.load('deploy', node.appname)

In Chef 11 my run fails because 'node.appname' isn't set until after a successful Chef run. This means server creation has become a 2 step process - launch with base role then bootstrap wrapper cookbook.

I understand why this behavior was changed but I'm curious how to work around it without rewriting my cookbooks and still adhere to DRY.

UPDATE

Thanks this is interesting but I'm not sure this works. For example, the generic deploy cookbook which also depends on appname is included in the my_rails_app recipe. So a run looks like

Role - where attribute is set

"appname": "my_rails_app"

App wrapper cookbook - load variables

include_recipe "deploy"
app = Chef::EncryptedDataBagItem.load('deploy', node.appname)

Deploy cookbook - load SSH keys

app = Chef::EncryptedDataBagItem.load('deploy', node.appname)

The deploy cookbook is what kills the Chef run.

I'm having an issue with an uncooperative EC2 Ubuntu 10.04 4 LTS instance. I'm trying to install a few prerequisites for a Ruby web app which has the following dependencies:

require 'rubygems'
require 'webrick/https'
require 'OpenSSL'
require 'Plist'
require 'uuidtools'
require 'uri'
require 'net/http'
require 'net/https'
require 'net/protocol'
require 'json'
require 'htmldiff'

I have no issue installing uuidtools, uri, json, htmldiff or plist, however, when I try to run the server.rb app I receive this error:

/home/ubuntu/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p125/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': cannot load such file -- OpenSSL (LoadError)
    from /home/ubuntu/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p125/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
    from server.rb:4:in `<main>'

I have the Ubuntu repository default 1.8 as well as 1.9.3p125 (which was installed via rvm). For each version I have the appropriate headers/dev packages installed. I've tried removing 1.8 and reinstalling 1.9.3 as well as the openssl library with no luck - I still receive the same message.

I've looked over the Puppet Master Cloudformation Template and understand it is using CloudInit baked into the Amazon Linux AMI. However, I'd like to use an existing Ubuntu 11.10 server image and still bootstrap the server as a Puppet Master. Reading through the CloudFormation and BootStrapping documentation it would seem this is possible but no adequate logs are generated on the server or when the stack is created. Short of creating a custom AMI is there a way to do this with an existing AMI?

I am using a custom bash script to spin up/down EC2 instances as needed. The script creates the instance similar to: knife ec2 server create --config .chef/knife.rb with a few other parameters. It creates the instance fine but I want to be able to assign my elastic ip to the current active instance.

Short of sending the output to a text file, parsing the output for the IP and instance name, and then running ec2-associate-address -i $instancename $ipaddress is there a good way to do this programmatically?

I believe I'm over thinking this.