In Chef how do you override default attribute values in node.json

chef

I'm running chef-solo with chef-solo -c solo.rb -j node.json -ldebug and it's failing because nginx cookbook/recipe refers to user "www-data" which I don't have. Can I change the value in node.json file? My node.json looks like this:

{
  "nginx": {
    "user": "my_username"
  },
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[nginx]",
    "recipe[mysql::server]"
  ]
}

My problem is the Opscode nginx recipe appears to ignore this setting.

Best Answer

Yes :-)

www-data is just a default user that is found on debian (and debian-like systems) for running web servers. Change it to something other than root and you should be fine. For most distros where there is no www-data there is a httpd user, otherwise you can nobody.

If you are on windows then use an appropriate user.

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For what it's worth, I've been doing the same thing with Chef (Hosted), EC2 and Amazon Linux. It took me a while, but I figured out that it was almost always easier to just roll my own recipes. I now have a dozen that I now use, and I've removed all the Opscode shared ones I initially tried.

In fact, my default recipe for nginx has just one line:

`package "nginx"`

So one way to go is to install that on your server first with yum install nginx and then grab the default config file it created. Bring that back to your cookbook as a template, and put in ERB lines to customize any values for your needs.

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