Chef - need a light weight "queue" (for the life of the recipe)

Question

Presently I have a chef recipe whereby I post messages to chat, inside a loop:

artifacts.each do |artifactItem|
    # Deploy the artifact
    #...

    # Post to chat
    chat_post "deployed artifact #{artifact_name}"
end

The result on my chat is like this:

chef [BOT]
deployed artifact A

chef [BOT]
deployed artifact B

chef [BOT]
deployed artifact C

I am wondering - is there an easy "queue" mechanism in chef, where I can queue up my deployment messages, and post them all at once (when my recipe completes) ? If so how would the code look.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this would be to use the delayed notifications system.

artifacts.each do |artifactItem|
    # Deploy the artifact
    #...

    # Post to chat
    r = chat_post "deployed artifact #{artifact_name}" do
      action :nothing
    end
    ruby_block "notification for #{artifact_name}" do
      block { }
      notifies :someaction, r
    end
end

Or something like that, make sure you check what action to use for the notification (whatever the default action on the chat_post resource is. Also this assumes chat_post is a resource and not some kind of helper method. If it's not a resource, you might need two ruby_blocks.

Answer 2

You can use node.run_state to save transient data that is accessible for the current chef run.