Question

I’m using chef-solo with vagrant

Chef defaults to root for everything. I want to only use root for a couple of things but use a functional user for everything else.

I’m basically installing a few of packages to standard locations (should be done as root).
And, then I’m compiling a bunch of stuff to a non-standard location. I want this entire tree to be owned by non-root user/group. Can I set the default user/group to an attribute?

More broadly, why does chef want to act as root and why is changing the default user to non-root not a more common request?

Specifically, the bash resource can take a user but this is not a full login of the user. So, the home dir is still root’s home dir (which the user can not write to), the group of files created is still root. So,

bash "foo" do
  user node[:globals][:username]
  code <<-EOH
    # do stuff
  EOH
end

do stuff is not a full login as user.

This question is related to https://serverfault.com/questions/402881/execute-as-vagrant-user-not-root-with-chef-solo and the bug mentioned there that is a won’t fix: http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1523 I guess I need to look closer, maybe at the environment attribute to execute: http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources#Resources-Execute

Answer 1

Most chef resources take a user (or owner) and group attributes to change the default. You can create the directory, setting the owner, group and mode to anything, you can execute (compile?) as a non-root user.

Check the resources your using for these attributes. It’s possible to store usernames in attributes or environments and then use those values in your recipe resource blocks as the user to run commands or create resources as.

A good reference for default resources: https://docs.chef.io/resource_directory.html

ie

directory '/tmp/what?' do
  owner node[:username]
  group node[:group]
  mode 00755
end

or

execute 'gcc somefile.cc' do
  user node[:user]
  group node[:group]
end

If there’s a specific action you can’t figure out, point it out.