Chef Infra Language: Reading Data Bags

data_bag

Data bags store global variables as JSON data. Data bags are indexed for searching and can be loaded by a cookbook or accessed during a search.

Use the data_bag method to get a list of the contents of a data bag.

The syntax for the data_bag method is as follows:

data_bag(bag_name)

Examples

The following example shows how the data_bag method can be used in a recipe.

Get a data bag, and then iterate through each data bag item

data_bag('users') #=> ['sandy', 'jill']

Iterate over the contents of the data bag to get the associated data_bag_item:

data_bag('users').each do |user|
  data_bag_item('users', user)
end

The id for each data bag item will be returned as a string.

data_bag_item

Data bags store global variables as JSON data. Data bags are indexed for searching and can be loaded by a cookbook or accessed during a search.

The data_bag_item method can be used in a recipe to get the contents of a data bag item.

The syntax for the data_bag_item method is as follows:

data_bag_item(bag_name, item, secret)

where secret is the secret used to load an encrypted data bag. If secret is not specified, Chef Infra Client looks for a secret at the path specified by the encrypted_data_bag_secret setting in the client.rb file.

Examples

The following examples show how the data_bag_item method can be used in a recipe.

Get a data bag, and then iterate through each data bag item

data_bag('users') #=> ['sandy', 'jill']

Iterate over the contents of the data bag to get the associated data_bag_item:

data_bag('users').each do |user|
  data_bag_item('users', user)
end

The id for each data bag item will be returned as a string.

Use the contents of a data bag in a recipe

The following example shows how to use the data_bag and data_bag_item methods in a recipe, also using a data bag named sea-power):

package 'sea-power' do
  action :install
end

directory node['sea-power']['base_path'] do
  # attributes for owner, group, mode
end

gale_warnings = data_bag('sea-power').map do |viking_north|
  data_bag_item('sea-power', viking_north)['source']
end

template '/etc/seattle/power.list' do
  source 'seattle-power.erb'
  # attributes for owner, group, mode
  variables(
    :base_path => node['sea-power']['base_path'],
    # more variables
    :repo_location => gale_warnings
  )
end