Chef - Different files for different environments

Question

I am new to Chef and I am working on environments to output different files for different environments. For example, I want to load a different robots.txt and .htaccess file for either staging or productions environments.

I found the code below from a website but am unsure how to accomplish what i am trying to do. Can this be done in a .erb file or does this have to live in an .rb file?

if node.chef_environment == 'development' do
#
# do not configure basic auth
#
else
#
#  configure basic auth
#
end

Also, how would I be able to dynamically change content in files instead of having to create a completely separate file. For instance, a link in a js file I want to change depending on the environment. Can that be done through a variable somewhere?

Answer 1

You could do it either way, but I would do it with an .rb file. If you had a .htaccess.erb file, it would be very congested with all your different environment code mingled together - harder to read/diagnose.

I find it much cleaner to have a cookbook dedicated to environment setup, have it's recipes detect the environment and grab all your configuration files from different places within the cookbook. You would be using the cookbook_file, remote_directory or remote_file resources for this.

Here is a decent example from the cookbook_file resource that detects the platform. You should be able to adapt it to detect the environment and source location of the file instead of the destination path.

cookbook_file "application.pm" do
  path case node['platform']
    when "centos","redhat"
      "/usr/lib/version/1.2.3/dir/application.pm"
    when "arch"
      "/usr/share/version/core_version/dir/application.pm"
    else
      "/etc/version/dir/application.pm"
    end
  source "application-#{node['languages']['perl']['version']}.pm"
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode "0644"
end

Something like this might work well for you:

cookbook_file ".htaccess" do
  path "/var/www/"
  source "apache/#{node['chef_environment'].htaccess"
  owner "apache"
  group "apache"
  mode "0400"
end

This should (I'm rusty and haven't Chef'ed in a while) create a file named .htaccess copied from /<cookbook_directory>/files/apache/development.htaccess on nodes in the development environment, and copied from /<cookbook_directory>/files/apache/production.htaccess on nodes in the production environment. Thus each file is clearly named and free from any logic - less likely to make any mistakes.