Setting properties in chef-client.rb

chef

I have a use-case where a chef recipe needs to use 'remote_file' to fetch a file on a virtual, and the fetch needs to be do through an HTTP proxy. This is not working because chef-client doesn't use the system proxy settings … it gets its proxy settings from the /etc/chef/chef-client.rb

So how do I get proxy settings (or settings in general) into the chef-client.rb file on a client?

Ideally, I'd like it to happen at client bootstrap time, but I can't see how to do that short of hacking the code.

The other possibility is that I could create a recipe that updates the chef-client.rb file. But that strikes me as a bit dangerous. And it means that you need to run chef-client twice before it works, assuming that the missing proxy setting in the first run causes the run to ultimately fail.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Best Answer

Fyi: The default config file is /etc/chef/client.rb, you would need to pass -c /etc/chef/chef-client.rb to use that file.

To set theChef configuration settings for http proxy, you can set the proxy to use with knife bootstrap with the command-line option --bootstrap-proxy URL. Or, you can add this in in your knife.rb.

knife[:bootstrap_proxy] = "https://proxy.example.com"

Replace the "https://proxy.example.com" value with your proxy server URL.

This will add the http_proxy and https_proxy lines to the /etc/chef/client.rb file automatically. Alternatively, you can create a customized bootstrap template with these configuration values in the client config section. Something like this (modified from ubuntu10.04-gems.erb):

(
cat <<'EOP'
http_proxy "http://proxy.example.com" # replace with your URL
<%= config_content %>
EOP
) > /etc/chef/client.rb

Related Solutions

Chef bootstrap chef-server, deploy the own validation.pem and webui.pem

validation.pem is the private key of a special client in chef server named chef-validator. While webui.pem is the private key of chef client webui.

You can regenerate the private/public keys of any client via knife API or chef server web UI.

Personally I would not suggest "replace" a private key but regenerate it because this is sensitive data and you'd better not keep using a special one for a long time. Instead, please regenerate them in a certain period for security reason.

However, it's doable to hack bookshelf data store under /var/opt/chef-server/bookshelf/data of your chef 11 server host to change the public key stored in an object file. For example, you can extract the object URL when you performing command knife client show chef-validator -VV. I strongly dis-recommend this way because it's hacking.

Merging Chef attribute arrays

If you want to add individual hash elements to an array you can do it using the insertion operator << instead of the assignment operator =

In cookbook A

# Create the default attribute as an array
default[:test]=[{:baz => 'A', :qux => 'B'}]

In cookbook B

# Using array insertion on an existing array
default[:test] << {:baz => 'C', :qux => 'D'}

If the runlist order is not guaranteed to be A,B then you need to guard against trying to insert into an array which doesn't yet exist.