Getting "ArgumentError: Cannot find a recipe matching default in cookbook hostsfile"

[kevinburke]

I'm trying to follow the instructions to install the recipe, and getting the above error. Looking at the repo, it's clear there is no recipes folder. All of the other LWRP's I saw had at least one recipe in the recipes folder.

In another cookbook I'm trying to do this:

include_recipe "hostsfile"

and getting the above error message.

Am I missing something?

[sethvargo]

Can you post a link to you github repo? What version of Chef? You shouldn't need to include_recipe to use the LWRP anyway.

[kevinburke]

I'm running Chef 10.14.2. I was just following your repo's README, which says that I should "simply include this recipe" to get access to the LWRP. This obviously fails, because there are no recipes attached to your LWRP.

Instead, I needed something like this:

hostsfile_entry "127.0.0.1" do
    hostname "localhost"
    action :append
    provider "hostsfile_entry"
end

Which works without a recipe include.

[sethvargo]

Right... It doesn't say to actually type 'include_recipe 'hostsfile'`, since it's not actually a recipe. It's an LWRP. It doesn't make sense to have a default recipe, since I don't know what you would want to do in your hostsfile.

[kevinburke]

In that case I'm not sure we are reading the same document. The Usage section of the README says:

Then, simply include this recipe and you'll be granted access to this LWPR:

# your_recipe.rb
include_recipe 'hostsfile'

I don't know that much about Chef. include_recipe is a fairly common method for making other cookbooks available in your project, I assumed it would work here and was confused about what to do when I was told no default recipe exists. I'd rather not have to look up a whole bunch of information about LWRP's, and providers, just to get this to run properly.

In general when writing documentation, it's a good idea to assume that people are not going to read, or be total experts in your field, and that people are going to copy/paste code samples at will. Easier to provide a code sample someone can easily figure out how to adapt, such as:

hostsfile_entry "127.0.0.1" do
    hostname "localhost"
    action :append
    provider "hostsfile_entry"
end

I can look at that, and know I need to change the 127.0.0.1 and the "localhost" to get it to work.

[nathenharvey]

Kevin,

I just updated the readme. You definitely shouldn't include the recipe in yours but your cookbook's metadata.rb should specify that it depends on the hostsfile cookbook.

# your cookbook's metadata.rb
depends 'hostsfile'

With that in place you should be set and also should be able to remove the provider declaration from your cookbook.

-Nathen

[kevinburke]

Thanks! I haven't seen depends before. I'll try it this afternoon.

[danryu]

Just got stung by this myself.

Please take the "include_recipe" bit off https://github.com/customink-webops/hostsfile#usage

Thanks

[sethvargo]

@dan77g where are you seeing that? There's no reference to include_recipe at the URL you referenced:

[danryu]

My bad ...
That was a stale howto from a different browser tab. Sorry for the confusion!

[danryu]

On an unrelated note, any idea why I would be getting

[2013-03-13T11:33:11+00:00] FATAL: NoMethodError: ruby_block[block_until_nodes](app_tier::default line 80) had an error: NoMethodError: undefined method `hostsfile_entry' for Chef::Resource::RubyBlock

when I do

nodes.each do |nd|
  if nd[:network][:interfaces][:eth1] then
    hostsfile_entry nd[:ipaddress] do
      hostname nd[:hostname]
      action :create_if_missing
    end
    Chef::Log.info("#{nd[:name]} has hostname #{nd[:hostname]} and has IP address #{nd[:ipaddress]}")
  end
end

I have:
depends 'hostsfile'

in my metadata.rb for this cookbook as suggested.

[sethvargo]

@dan77g Can you point me to the full recipe? Gist or GitHub repo...

[danryu]

Thanks ... there's a recipe file at https://gist.github.com/dan77g/5173216

Apart from that, it's just the
depends 'hostsfile'
in metadata.rb.

[sethvargo]

You can't use LWRPs (easily) in a Ruby block because of scope. You also don't need a ruby_block as you've done there, from what I can tell.

[danryu]

Didn't realise the scope issue, thanks. (I would love to know where that was documented ...)
(And yes, the ruby_block is cruft in this instance ....)

[simonmorley]

Just to be pedantic, you still have include_recipe in your blog about the same. Might confuse some folks, like me, until they stumble upon the full repo.

[sethvargo]

@simonmorley I don't have access to change that blog post anymore.

[simonmorley]

Ah. That's annoying for you.