Question

I have a chef cookbook which installs nginx and install a custom nginx.conf file. It’s basically the same cookbook on Opscode, and uses cookbook_file to install the file.

If I make a change to the conf file, then rerun the cookbook using chef the configuration file isn’t updated. This seems like a bug — am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

In chef that the order of commands in the recipe is the order of execution. if you kept the template for the nginx.conf and it comes after your cookbook_file command, the generated template will overwrite your file.

e.g.

# cookbook file
cookbook_file "#{node[:nginx][:dir]}/nginx.conf" do
  source "my_nginx.conf"
  mode 0644
  owner "root"
  group "root"
end

# template
template "nginx.conf" do
  path "#{node[:nginx][:dir]}/nginx.conf"
  source "nginx.conf.erb"
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0644
  notifies :reload, "service[nginx]"
end

The template would overwrite the file laid down by cookbook_file.