Remove node_name requirement from chef_lifecycle script

[webframp]

Just commenting in case this is something being considered for refactor. The chef_lifecycle script in this repo is currently just a static file and greps for node_name in the client.rb to determine instance name.

Currently it is recommended to leave node_name out of the chef client.rb, see node_name setting here and let chef determine it automatically from ohai data. So node_name seems like sort of an odd thing to depend on here: https://github.com/JonathanSerafini/chef-cfn/blob/master/files/default/chef_lifecycle#L15

Maybe this could be moved to a template that is rendered with the node name via ohai data or be converted to just use the ohai data directly.

Thanks for providing this cookbook.

[JonathanSerafini]

Holy hell someone actually uses this, awesome !

Aight, so far I've been using user-data to craft a custom client.rb with the node_name set, the rationale being that names are based on a mix of instance tags + instance id and that the node_name would therefore never vary.

I'll need to test how our nodes behave to having the hostname changed in user-data, but I don't foresee any issues so far and will look into getting this changed for you. Alternately, it may even be possible to do something with firstrun.json.

For the refactor, I was planning on:

• general code cleanup
• ohai module cleanup
• further cloud-init improvements
• documentation refactor
• lwrp refactor to custom resource

[webframp]

Awesome, will watch for the changes!

This cookbook is very useful to pull cfn data into ohai attributes, among other things. Thanks again.

[sandervanburken]

As an example, I solved it like this:

instance=$(ohai fqdn | jq -r '.[]')
knife node delete $instance --config-option node_name=$instance -c /etc/chef/client.rb -y

Thank you for all your efforts!