Chef execute block

Question

I am very new to Chef. I have a recipe that installs sendmail and it does my configurations. I have noticed that Chef restarts the service on every run. That is because I'm running an execute that calls the session restart.

It looks like this:

execute "hashAccess" do
  command "makemap hash /etc/mail/access < /etc/mail/access"
  notifies :restart, "service[sendmail]"
end

I need to call this only when the access file if updated.

template "/etc/mail/access" do
  source "access.erb"
  mode   "0644"
  notifies :run, "execute[hashAccess]"
end

When the file is updated, the execute is called twice. Both of the resources are in the same recipe and when I try to define hashAccess I get an error

 ERROR: Cannot find a resource for define on amazon version 2013.09

How do I make the execute resource to run only when called?

Answer 1

You should add action :nothing to your execute resource.

execute "hashAccess" do
  command "makemap hash /etc/mail/access < /etc/mail/access"
  action :nothing
  notifies :restart, "service[sendmail]"
end

This way it will not be executed, unless notified by other resource.