How can I display the output of a Opscode Chef bash command in my console?

Question

I use Vagrant to spawn a standard \"precise32\" box and provision it with Chef so I can test my Node.js code on Linux when I work on a Windows machine. This works fine.

Answer 1

When you run chef - suppose we are using chef-solo, you can use -l debug to output more debug information into stdout.

For example: chef-solo -c solo.rb -j node.json -l debug

For example, a simple cookbook as below:

$ tree 
.
├── cookbooks
│   └── main
│       └── recipes
│           └── default.rb
├── node.json
└── solo.rb

3 directories, 3 files

default.rb

bash "echo something" do
   code <<-EOF
     echo 'I am a chef!'
   EOF
end

You'll see the following output like below:

Compiling Cookbooks...
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Cookbooks to compile: [:main]
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Loading Recipe main via include_recipe
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Found recipe default in cookbook main
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Loading from cookbook_path: /data/DevOps/chef/cookbooks
Converging 1 resources
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Converging node optiplex790
Recipe: main::default
  * bash[echo something] action run[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] INFO: Processing bash[echo something] action run (main::default line 4)
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Platform ubuntu version 13.04 found
I am a chef!
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] INFO: bash[echo something] ran successfully

    - execute "bash"  "/tmp/chef-script20130724-17175-tgkhkz"

[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] INFO: Chef Run complete in 0.041678909 seconds
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] INFO: Running report handlers
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] INFO: Report handlers complete
Chef Client finished, 1 resources updated
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Forked child successfully reaped (pid: 17175)
[2013-07-24T15:49:26+10:00] DEBUG: Exiting

I think it contains the information you want. For example, output and the exit status of the shell script/command.

BTW: looks like there is a limitation (prompt for password?), you won't be able to use su

[2013-07-24T15:46:10+10:00] INFO: Running queued delayed notifications before re-raising exception
[2013-07-24T15:46:10+10:00] DEBUG: Re-raising exception: Mixlib::ShellOut::ShellCommandFailed - bash[echo something] (main::default line 4) had an error: Mixlib::ShellOut::ShellCommandFailed: Expected process to exit with [0], but received '1'
---- Begin output of "bash"  "/tmp/chef-script20130724-16938-1jhil9v" ----
STDOUT: 
STDERR: su: must be run from a terminal
---- End output of "bash"  "/tmp/chef-script20130724-16938-1jhil9v" ----
Ran "bash"  "/tmp/chef-script20130724-16938-1jhil9v" returned 1

Answer 2

Use the live_stream attribute of the execute resource

execute 'foo' do
  command 'cat /etc/hosts'
  live_stream true
  action :run
end

Script output will be printed to the console

   Starting Chef Client, version 12.18.31
   resolving cookbooks for run list: ["apt::default", "foobar::default"]
   Synchronizing Cookbooks:
   Converging 2 resources
   Recipe: foobar::default
     * execute[foo] action run
       [execute] 127.0.0.1  default-ubuntu-1604 default-ubuntu-1604
          127.0.0.1 localhost
          127.0.1.1 vagrant.vm  vagrant
          ::1     localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
          ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
          ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
       - execute cat /etc/hosts

https://docs.chef.io/resource_execute.html

Answer 3

Kind of related... setting the log_location (-L) to a file prevents the chef logs (Chef::Log.info() or simply log) from going to standard out.

You can override this to print the full log information to stdout

chef-client -L /dev/stdout

Answer 4

I used the following:

bash "install npm modules" do
  code <<-EOH
    su -l vagrant -c "cd /vagrant && npm install"
  EOH
  flags "-x"
end

The flags property makes the command execute like bash -x script.sh

Answer 5

I try to use logging when possible, but I've found that in some scenarios seeing the output is important. Here's the short version of the way I do it. Substituting the execute resource for the bash resource also works fine. Both standard error and standard output go into the file.

results = "/tmp/output.txt"
file results do
    action :delete
end

cmd = "ls  /"
bash cmd do
    code <<-EOH
    #{cmd} &> #{results}
    EOH
end

ruby_block "Results" do
    only_if { ::File.exists?(results) }
    block do
        print "\n"
        File.open(results).each do |line|
            print line
        end
    end
end