# Location attributes

**URL:** https://discourse.chef.io/t/location-attributes/5039
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)
**Created:** [February 17, 2014, 7:12pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/location-attributes/5039 "2014-02-17T19:12:59Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Douglas\_Garstang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c2a13f/32.png) [@Douglas\_Garstang](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Douglas_Garstang)
#### Post date: [February 17, 2014, 7:12pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/location-attributes/5039/1 "2014-02-17T19:12:59Z")

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Sorry for the new thread. I’m going to take another stab at this.

We have servers in several physical locations. Each has different  
attributes. We’re currently implementing some of these attributes (mostly  
host addresses and such) with one role per location. A portion of the  
attributes set in the role for one of these locations (us4) looks like this:

```
"default_attributes": {
    "couchbase": {
        "servers": ["changeme", "changeme"]
    },
    "redis": {
        "master": "redis01-us4.foobar.net",
        "slave": "redis02-us4.foobar.net"
    },
    "mysql": {
        "host": "dbproxy01-us4.foobar.net",
        "master": "db-foobar.cptuvxysk1b5.us-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com"
    },
    "rabbitmq": {
        "server": "mbus01-us4.foobar.net"
    },
    "memcache": {
        "servers": ["memc01-us4.foobar.com", "memc02-us4.bitcasa.com"]
    },
    "rsyslog": {
        "server_ip": "logs01-us4.foobar.net",
        "protocol": "udp",
        "remote_logs": true
    },
    "graphite": {
        "server": "carbon",
        "graphite_port": "2003",
        "port": "8125",
        "mgmt_port": "8126"
    },

```

This approach bothers me because changing an attribute here referenced by  
any cookbook will break those referencing cookbooks. This makes the  
cookbooks brittle.

I suppose I could break the file into smaller pieces along the lines of  
couchbase\_us4.json, redis\_us4.json, mysql\_us4.json and so on. That would at  
least make it clearer which services which files belong to.

It’s been recommended to me that we use location based cookbooks instead of  
roles. I haven’t seen any objective reasons why yet. I also don’t see how  
that would make the cookbooks any less brittle. The attributes as defined  
could still be referenced by several other cookbooks and break when the  
attribute changes. Putting attributes into a location cookbook would also  
mean we’d have to define them with ruby, which is less readable than json.

‘Don’t do that.’ could be said in response to us changing the attributes,  
but we’re still changing things frequently and trying to stabilise.

Doug.

–  
Regards,

Douglas Garstang  
[http://www.linkedin.com/in/garstang](http://www.linkedin.com/in/garstang)  
Email: [doug.garstang@gmail.com](mailto:doug.garstang@gmail.com)  
Cell: +1-805-340-5627