chef include recipes override attributes

Question

When you include a recipe in another recipe how to do you override the attributes.

It looks the include recipe used the default attributes not the attributes of the recipe when it was run previously in the run_list.

Answer 1

When you are creating a wrapper cookbook, it is common to override attributes.

Suppose, you have my_web_server cookbook with my_web_server/recipes/default.rb like this:

include_recipe "apache2"

And you would like to override attribute default_site_enabled from apache2 cookbook. Then your file my_web_server/attributes/default.rb should look like:

override['apache']['default_site_enabled'] = true

And don't forget to specify dependencies in my_web_server/metadata.rb like:

depends "apache2"