Question

I’m trying to use remote_file to cache a local copy of a large package on a Windows share. How is this done?

I can’t get it to work with a drive-letter-based path, a UNC-based path, or a file: URL.

Answer 1

I worked out a trick that I think is pretty neat. I created the following definition (and put it in definitions/default.rb):

define :file_from_network, :action => :create do
   myPath = (params[:path] || params[:name])
   mySource = params[:source]

   if File.exist?(mySource)
      file myPath do
         action params[:action]
         content File.open(mySource) {|io| io.read}
      end
   else
      Chef::Log.error("File #{mySource} not found!")
   end
end

Definitions do not work quite the same way resources do, but this was easy to implement and does what I need it to do. The in-memory read makes it impractical for huge files, of course, but it allows Chef to check that the content is different before triggering an action on the file resource.