Different sources of attributes

An attribute can be defined at multiple places and it is very important to declare an attribute at the right place with right precedence order. During a chef-client run, attributes are collected from the following different sources:

  • Nodes (collected by Ohai at the start of each chef-client run)
  • Attribute files (associated with cookbook) are collected during compile time
  • Recipes (associated with cookbook. The attributes specified in the recipes might be collected during run time as well
  • Environments
  • Roles

The life cycle of an attribute can be understood by the following sequence of steps:

  1. Developer writes attributes in the attribute file, recipe, role, or environment.
  2. The concerned code is pushed to the Chef server.
  3. During ...

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