Chef environment variable question

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi All,

If I have the following setup:

Cookbook CB ------->Recipe A --------------> ENV['foo']='bar' --------------> Include recipe C ------->Recipe B --------------> Bunch of resources ------->Recipe C --------------> Bunch of resources

Assume that the run_list contains A, B (but not C explicitly, although C is invoked via A using the include recipe statement within A)

Questions:

  1. Will the environment variable foo (defined in A) be available for resources within recipe C, i.e. when recipe C runs as part of A?
  2. Will the environment variable foo (defined in A) be available for resources defined in recipe B?

Thank you
Aravind

2

When you start asking questions about ordering or sequencing, always look at how the Ruby code itself will execute. include_recipe is a method that runs the code (recipe compile phase) at the point that Ruby causes the method to be executed. Similarly the ENV[]= is plain old Ruby code and happens when execution hits that line. Layered on top of this is Chef’s two-pass compile/converge structure. You can read a bit about that in https://coderanger.net/two-pass/.

tl;dr yes the variable would be set for all of them after that line runs.