Issue with Custom Resource (Chef 12.5+ way) properties

Chef Infra (archive)
1

I have a custom resource that reuses the core resource execute. It has 2 properties (retries & retry_delay) that have the same name as the properties of the execute resource. See below.

resources/wait.rb

property :name,          String,  default: 'just wait'
property :retries,       Integer, default: 100
property :retry_delay,   Integer, default: 10

default_action :create #added default_action to avoid FoodCritic error

action :create do
  execute name do
    command "some command"
    retries new_resource.retries
    retry_delay new_resource.retry_delay
  end
end

When I try to use my custom wait resource (no properties passed in in order to rely on the default values of the retries and retry_delay properties) as in below, my kitchen converge fails because Chef thinks the values for retries is 0 (vs 100) and the value for retry_delay is 2 (vs 10)

recipes/myrecipe.rb

mycookbook_wait 'wait for process to finish' do
end

I was using this as a reference: https://docs.chef.io/custom_resources.html#new-resource-property

The workaround I had to do was rename the properties of my wait resource as in below:

resources/wait.rb with workaround

property :name,                String,  default: 'wait for Jenkins'
property :retry_count,         Integer, default: 100
property :retry_delay_seconds, Integer, default: 10

default_action :create #added default_action to avoid FoodCritic error

action :create do
  execute name do
    command "some command"
    retries retry_count
    retry_delay retry_delay_seconds
  end
end

How can I accomplish the same thing without having to make sure that my resource property names don’t collide with core resource property names?

2

The root of the problem is that retries is part of Chef::Resource, and is handled in the old-school way before properties and default were a thing. It is directly initialized as an instance variable in Chef::Resource#initialize. You would have to do something like this:

def initialize(*args)
  super
  @retries = 100
end

Some day we’ll finish unifying all this code, but for now that is the best approach.

3

Thanks. That worked. I’m looking forward to the real fix. :grinning: