Whats the best way to get an external variable/input from user in your cookbook,

Hi,

I ned some advise here, i am using chef to do build deployments , now the
version of the artifact is one field in the build deployment which will
keep on changing and there are times when the Devloper or operations
decide what version of the file they want to pick and deploy.

Whats the best way to expose that variable ? can i add it in a role/node or
a databag or amy be there is some other easy way.

Please help

Thanks
Manoj