Chef does not read attributes and definitions

Question

I have a an old project I've built with chef (https://github.com/noha/virtual-gemstone). It uses chef together with vagrant to achieve its goal. The project was stale for the last couple of months and now I want to reactivate it. But I don't have much luck running it with chef 11. No matter what I try the values in attributes/default.rb aren't there. In the gemstone/attributes/default.rb file I have

default[:gemstone][:base_url] =   "http://glass-downloads.gemstone.com/gss24"
default[:gemstone][:version] =   "GemStone64Bit2.4.4.1-x86_64.Linux"
default[:gemstone][:dir] =       "/opt/gemstone"
default[:gemstone][:log_dir] =   "/opt/gemstone/log"
default[:gemstone][:lock_dir] =  "/opt/gemstone/locks"
default[:gemstone][:user] =      "gemstone"
default[:gemstone][:no_gems] = 3
default[:gemstone][:low_port] = 7000
default[:gemstone][:cache_path] = Chef::Config[:file_cache_path]

and in the gemstone/recipes/base.rb I have

...
tmp = node[:gemstone][:cache_path]
base_url = "#{node[:gemstone][:base_url]}"
file = "#{node[:gemstone][:version]}.zip"
dir = "#{node[:gemstone][:dir]}/#{node[:gemstone][:version]}"
...

but the values are always undefined/empty. I've tried even to set node.default in the attributes file and also while accessing the values in the recipe.

In order to test it I've copied all recipe .rb files into a single default.rb and added the content from the attributes file. This works but no it complains about a missing function that I've defined in gemstone/definitions/monit.rb called monit_gem.

The whole project was working months before. So I think there is something fundamentally wrong with my current setup for chef 11. But I couldn't find much that needs to be tweaked for this in order to work properly.

What might be the reason that attribute and definition files aren't read by chef?

Answer 1

I got it working with help from the opscode list. If include_recipe is used in recipes it is essential to put a depends statement in metadata.rb for the included recipe. Otherwise attributes, definitions and such are not read and therefor are not available inside the recipe.