How do I configure defaults for Chef generator attributes?

Chef Infra (archive)
1

When using chef generate cookbook, it generates with some default attributes for copyright, license, and email. I went looking for how to override those, and it doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere. The attributes that worked for knife cookbook create:

cookbook_copyright "MyCo"
cookbook_email "me@example.com"

are ignored by ChefDK’s generators.

After a little spelunking through the ChefDK source code, I found that if I put the following in ~/.chef/config.rb, it worked:

chefdk.generator.copyright_holder "MyCo"
chefdk.generator.license   "apache2"
chefdk.generator.email     "me@example.com"

Yay for progress! I can run chef generate cookbook and everything works great. Until I run Berkshelf, that is…

PS C:\Users\l.wright\Documents\code\mycookbook> berks
C:/opscode/chefdk/embedded/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/chef-config-12.7.2/lib/chef-config/workstation_config_loader.rb:161:in `rescue in read_config': You have an error in your config file C:/Users/l.wright/.chef/config.rb (ChefConfig::ConfigurationError)

NoMethodError: undefined method `copyright_holder' for nil:NilClass
  C:/Users/l.wright/.chef/config.rb:1:in `from_string'

Is there a way to set these defaults that will make both ChefDK and berks happy?

2

You can generate your own generator cookbook with “chef generate generator”

  • and just enable it in knife.rb (chefdk.generator_cookbook
    "path-to-your-generator-cookbook/chef_generator"

Cool.

3

I’m familiar with that, but it seems like this should work without having to have my own generator cookbook.

4

How about something like this in your knife.rb/config.rb:
if File.basename($PROGRAM_NAME).eql?('chef') && ARGV[0].eql?('generate') chefdk.generator.copyright_holder "MyCo" chefdk.generator.license "apache2" chefdk.generator.email "me@example.com" end

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5

That’s a good workaround, and I’ll probably use something like that for now. It still feels like this should Just Work out of the box, though.

6

The following is working for me, for both chef generate and knife cookbook create:

knife[:cookbook_copyright] = 'MyCo'
knife[:cookbook_email] = 'my_email'

Regards,
Christine

1 Like