Accessing attributes from within recipes

Question

Let us say I do knife node edit mynode and within the normal section I edit the JSON to add "myattribute": "myvalue",. I save this and verify that it has taken effect by issuing knife search node -a myattribute mynode, and I see it there. How would I then use this value from within a recipe? I would have expected to just be able to say node['myattribute'] when running the recipe on mynode but that just returns nothing. The usual Ohai attributes such as node['hostname'] obviously work as expected.

Answer 1

I think that according to chef documentation you should use normal with node data.

A normal attribute is a setting that persists in the node object. A normal attribute has a higher attribute precedence than a default attribute.

you can read about it here:

https://docs.chef.io/attributes.html

https://docs.chef.io/knife_node.html

some example:

  "normal": {
    "ebs": {
      "devices": [
        {
          "mount_device": "/dev/xvdf",
          "encrypt": true,
          "volume_mapping": [
            {
              "device": "/dev/xvdf"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },

In you recipe:

if node.ebs.devices[0]['mount_device'] == '/dev/xvdf' and node.ebs.devices[0]['encrypt'] ...

Another example with node['myattribute']

   "normal": {
        "myattribute": "myvalue"
        },