Accessing environment variables in Windows

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi ,

I need to access Environment variables in Windows while running the
cookbooks. I have had 2 issues with this:

  1. When I run with powershell and access them using $Env:HOME ( for
    example) and run “chef client” manually on the box , it seems to pick it up
    but when I run it from my CI , it doesn’t seem to work since the path seems
    to change. I have been trying to echo this variable on the console but
    haven’t been successful. How do we do this ?

  2. If I am not using the powershell cookbook and I use the “remote_file” or
    "remote_directory" resource to copy folders ( This works fine when I
    hardcode the paths) , in that case, how do I access the PATH or the HOME
    variable ( or basically any other Environment variable ) in my cookbooks?

Can you shed some light on this ?

thanks
Ranjan

2

Hello - I am not sure that I understand your first issue. On the second issue, there are various ways to access variables. To use environmental vars, ruby stores them in a constant ENV which is a has and can be access like this: ENV['COMPUTERNAME'].

The recipe is just ruby, so you can create other variables and just use them. I.e.

config_file = "\\fileserver\configs\#{ENV['COMPUTERNAME']}"

Does that help?

P

On Jan 18, 2012, at 3:14 AM, "Madhurranjan Mohaan" maadhuuranjan.m@gmail.com wrote:

Hi ,

I need to access Environment variables in Windows while running the cookbooks. I have had 2 issues with this:

  1. When I run with powershell and access them using $Env:HOME ( for example) and run "chef client" manually on the box , it seems to pick it up but when I run it from my CI , it doesn't seem to work since the path seems to change. I have been trying to echo this variable on the console but haven't been successful. How do we do this ?

  2. If I am not using the powershell cookbook and I use the "remote_file" or "remote_directory" resource to copy folders ( This works fine when I hardcode the paths) , in that case, how do I access the PATH or the HOME variable ( or basically any other Environment variable ) in my cookbooks?

Can you shed some light on this ?

thanks
Ranjan

3

Paul,

It definitely helps. We can ignore the 1st one for now.

Thanks
Ranjan

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 8:03 PM, Paul Morton - BIA
pmorton@biaprotect.comwrote:

Hello - I am not sure that I understand your first issue. On the second
issue, there are various ways to access variables. To use environmental
vars, ruby stores them in a constant ENV which is a has and can be access
like this: ENV['COMPUTERNAME'].

The recipe is just ruby, so you can create other variables and just use
them. I.e.

config_file = "\\fileserver\configs\#{ENV['COMPUTERNAME']}"

Does that help?

P

On Jan 18, 2012, at 3:14 AM, "Madhurranjan Mohaan" <
maadhuuranjan.m@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi ,

I need to access Environment variables in Windows while running the
cookbooks. I have had 2 issues with this:

  1. When I run with powershell and access them using $Env:HOME ( for
    example) and run "chef client" manually on the box , it seems to pick it up
    but when I run it from my CI , it doesn't seem to work since the path seems
    to change. I have been trying to echo this variable on the console but
    haven't been successful. How do we do this ?

  2. If I am not using the powershell cookbook and I use the "remote_file"
    or "remote_directory" resource to copy folders ( This works fine when I
    hardcode the paths) , in that case, how do I access the PATH or the HOME
    variable ( or basically any other Environment variable ) in my cookbooks?

Can you shed some light on this ?

thanks
Ranjan