Opsworks Custom Chef Recipies

Question

I have successfully deployed my application using AWS OpsWorks, now I am trying to implement a custom Chef Cookbook that will allow me to set the bash environment variables. I have setup the Git repo the cookbook is being updated with OpsWorks. I generated the cookbook using the knife command on my dev box which is really just the directory structure with a recipes/default.rb file containing a few lines of code.

When I try to do something like the following I seem to keep getting errors

node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
    deploy = node[:deploy][application]
    command "ls -la"
end

(Note: ls -la is just for testing i know this will not set the environment variables)

I get the following error: ERROR: Caught exception during execution of custom recipe: xyz-enviroment: NoMethodError - undefined method command' for #<Chef::Recipe:0x7feb59200c00> - /opt/aws/opsworks/releases/20130328224322_109/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.8/gems/chef-0.9.15.5/bin/../lib/chef/mixin/recipe_definition_dsl_core.rb:56:in method_missing

Also if I try something like

execute "setting up the enviroment" do
    # TODO: Add code that does something here
end

I get the following error:

execute[setting up the enviroment] (/opt/aws/opsworks/current/site-cookbooks/xyz-enviroment/recipes/default.rb:18:in `from_file') had an error:
No such file or directory - setting up the enviroment

I'm new to Chef so I'm sure there is something simple I'm doing wrong I just haven't been able to figure it out. Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

I already solved my issue before seeing the responses below, they may have worked to solve the issue but I don't have the time to go back and try them now.

My solution was to use a Chef template to create an initializer file to set the variables when rails boots up the application.

# deafult.rb

node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
    deploy = node[:deploy][application]

    execute "restart Rails app #{application}" do
        cwd deploy[:current_path]
        command node[:opsworks][:rails_stack][:restart_command]
        action :nothing
    end

    template "#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/current/config/initializers/dev_enviroment.rb" do
        source "dev_enviroment.erb"
        cookbook 'dev-enviroment'
        group deploy[:group]
        owner deploy[:user]
        variables(:dev_env => deploy[:dev_env])

        notifies :run, resources(:execute => "restart Rails app #{application}")

        only_if do
            File.exists?("#{deploy[:deploy_to]}") && File.exists?("#{deploy[:deploy_to]}/current/config/")
        end
    end
end

dev_enviroment.erb

ENV['VAR1'] = "<%= @dev_env[:VAR1] %>"
ENV['VAR2'] = "<%= @dev_env[:VAR2] %>"

The custom Chef JSON used in the Opsworks stack layer:

{
    "deploy": {
        "myapp": {
            "dev_env": {
                "VAR1": "INFO1",
                "VAR2": "INFO2",
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

You didn't specify what command to run, so it's actually trying to run setting up the environment, which isn't a valid command.

Try instead specifying the command attribute inside the block:

execute "setting up the enviroment" do
  command "/path/to/command --flags"
end

Alternatively, set the resource name to the command itself:

execute "/path/to/command --flags" do
  # TODO: Add code that does something here
end

Answer 3

Your second question was correctly answered by clb. As for your first, 'command' is not a valid chef resource, you want something like:

node[:deploy].each do |application, deploy|
  deploy = node[:deploy][application]
  execute "running a command for #{application}" do
    command "ls -la"
  end
end

Answer 4

OpsWorks has a new feature, where you can add Environmentvariables on the App

You can access them via

node[:deploy]['appshortname'][:environment_variables][:variable_name]

( see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/attributes-json-deploy.html#attributes-json-deploy-app-environment )

So you can directly set them for your chef context like this:

node[:deploy]['magento']['environment_variables'].each {|key, value| ENV[key]=value }

And you can "dump" that into a shell script for example like this:

file "#{release_path}/environment.sh" do
  content ENV.reduce("#!/bin/bash\n") { |a, e| a + "export #{e[0]}=\"#{e[1]}\"\n" }
  mode '0775'
end

Answer 5

We do something similar, and solved it by adding our environment variables to the json config file in Opsworks dashboard. In chef, we write the file on deploy with this template: https://github.com/octocall/opsworks-cookbooks/blob/34e60267a4d3b5b9cf84e91829cc80c98c26f8ed/deploy/definitions/opsworks_rails.rb#L26, and then we symlink it using the "symlink_before_migrate" property of the json file, like this:

{
  "deploy": {
    "APPNAME": {
      "symlink_before_migrate": {
        "config/.env": ".env"
      }
    }
  }
}