How to update IP address if they change?

[customink-webops]

How to update IP address if they change?

[vandadck]

I'm not familiar with this cookbook but seems like you could try:

hostsfile_entry '1.2.3.4' do
  ip_address '5.6.7.8'
  action :update
end

[jleonett]

True that might work. But that would require me to make the change, then later after all the nodes have been updated to go in there and delete that piece of code.

Ideally looking for a way to make one change in one spot to do the updates. My solution above with building a 2nd hosts file and only copying it over the original when there are changes will accomplish that but feels a bit messy. I don't like my second option as it can be prone more to human error - IE someone updates it in the original list but does not put the original value in the "remove" list - which can break the system.

[sethvargo]

Hi @jleonett

This is outside of the scope of this cookbook. Chef does not know the "prestate" and "poststate", so it's not possible to do a diff like that unfortunately.

It sounds like you want to manage the entire file. Why not just use a simple template resource that renders /etc/hosts directly from attributes instead then?

[jleonett]

Kind of what I was suspecting. Thanks for confirming. I am going to look into the template option as well. Kind of new to Chef so I need to read up on the template capabilities. Just have not used one yet. As long as I can add to a template from multiple recipes it should work well.