How to access current values from a Chef data bag?

chef-infra

Solution

Dumping data from the node hash or data bags into a separate file is a good way of communicating between the Chef server and scripts running on a node. If your script can parse JSON then it's really easy:

file "/etc/script.json" do
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0644
  content node[:whatever].to_json
 end

Using the Chef REST interface sounds like overkill, and groping around in /var/cache/chef is just rude. (-:

Problem

I have a server managed by Chef. I need to access some values that live in a cookbook data bag from scripts not run by Chef. /* Chef REST API allows to access data bag values as seen by Chef server. This is not what I want. Each `chef-client` run may introduce a number of coordinated changes, including changes in the data bag. If data on the server had already changed but `chef-client` did not run locally yet, local setup and server-side data bag may be out of sync. */ I see two solutions: - Parse/import the data bag file under `/var/cache/chef/cookbooks/<book-name>` since it's more or less normal Ruby. - Inside a recipe, dump relevant data from the data bag into a plain file accessible from my scripts. Are there better options?

Original source