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Question

I have a Vagrantfile that provisions a VM by running a chef recipe. The first resource in the chef recipe is:

directory "/downloads" do
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode "0755"
  action :create
end

# check that it worked:
raise "/downloads doesn't exist!" unless File.exists? "/downloads"

When I run this at work, it works fine.

When I run it at home, it fails, the exception is raised when I check to see if /downloads exists.

I'm not sure why this is happening. I would expect it to behave identically, since the underlying Vagrant box is the same both at work and at home. I am a chef newb so perhaps there is something I am not understanding about the order in which the resources are run within my recipe? I would expect them to run in sequential order...

I also tried putting a notifies call inside the directory block, where I call another execute block :immediately . That works, but inside the second execute block I test to see whether /downloads has been created and it hasn't.

Clearly I'm missing something very basic.

Answer 1

Chef has two phases of execution: a compile phase and a converge phase.

In the compile phase, any resource declarations you write (like directory ) are compiled but not executed. Any bare Ruby code you write is also executed at this time. In the converge phase, any compiled resources are then converged in a test-and-set operation.

I'm going to assume that at work, you already have a /downloads directory pre-existing, so the resource is a no-op during converge, and the raise doesn't happen during compile.

If you want arbitrary Ruby code to execute at converge time, put it in a ruby_block resource.