chef-solo not updating postgres pg_hba.conf

Question

I am using Chef Solo to provision a Vagrant Virtual Machine. Here is the relevant Vagrantfile snippet:

chef.run_list = [
    "databox::default",
    "mydbstuff"
]

chef.json = {

    "postgresql": {
        "config" : {
            "listen_addresses": "*"
        },
        "pg_hba": [
            {"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "postgres",   "addr": null,               "method": "ident"},
            {"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "all",        "addr": null,               "method": "md5"},
            {"type": "host",  "db": "all", "user": "all",        "addr": "127.0.0.1/32",     "method": "md5"},
            {"type": "host",  "db": "all", "user": "all",        "addr": "::1/128",          "method": "md5"},

            {"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "vagrant",    "addr": null,               "method": "ident"},
            {"type": "host",  "db": "all", "user": "all",        "addr": "192.168.248.1/24", "method": "md5"}
        ]
    },
    "databox": {
        "db_root_password": "abc123",
        "databases": {
            "postgresql": [
                { "username": "db1", "password": "abc123", "database_name": "db1" },
                { "username": "db2", "password": "abc123", "database_name": "db2" }
            ]
        }
    }
}

The mydbstuff::default recipe looks like this:

postgresql_connection_info = {
  :host => "localhost",
  :port => node['postgresql']['config']['port'],
  :username => 'postgres',
  :password => node['postgresql']['password']['postgres']
}

postgresql_database_user 'vagrant' do
  connection postgresql_connection_info
  password 'vagrant'
  action :create
end

node['databox']['databases']['postgresql'].each do |db|
  postgresql_database_user 'vagrant' do
    connection postgresql_connection_info
    action :grant
    database_name db.database_name
  end
end

I am trying to allow connections by the local vagrant user without a password, and by any user from the VirtualBox private network. The pg_hba array in my chef.json has four lines that are copied from the default configuration and two lines to do the other stuff that I want to do. If I add these two lines to the pg_hba.conf file manually, they work just fine.

The problem is that my changes aren't actually written to the pg_hba.conf file. What's preventing them from being written?

Answer 1

It appears that the databox cookbook overwrites the Postgres permissions array using node.set instead of just modifying the part that it needs.

I have submitted a pull request to the project to change this behavior so that additional entries can be added to the file.

Answer 2

I faced same problem with chef-solo. My way out was to create a template for pg_hba.conf and replaced at the end of execution of recipe.