Copy a whole directory structure in Chef

Question

I have a directory structure (sample data) that I want to copy from within a Chef recipe. It seems the only way to do this is to explicitly create each individual directory and file:

directory "/mnt/data/experiment1/dataset1" do
   recursive true
   only_if { node.chef_environment == "dev" }
end


directory "/mnt/data/experiment1/dataset2" do
   recursive true
   only_if { node.chef_environment == "dev" }
end

directory "/mnt/data/experiment2/dataset1" do
   recursive true
   only_if { node.chef_environment == "dev" }
end


directory "/mnt/data/experiment1/dataset2" do
   recursive true
   only_if { node.chef_environment == "dev" }
end


cookbook_file "/mnt/data/experiment1/dataset1/testfile1.txt" do
   owner "atom"
   group "atom"
   mode "0644"
   source "sampledata/experiment1/dataset1/testfile1.txt"
   only_if { node.chef_environment == "dev"}
end

...

Is there a way to simply recursively copy an entire directory structure from the cookbook? Specifying the name of each file inside the recipe seems redundant and error-prone (ie, if we add a file to the tree but forget to reference it in the recipe, it won't be copied.)

I guess a hack workaround would be to work out where all the chef files get copied to on the target machine and do a cp -r but is there something cleaner?

Or am I going about this the wrong way?

Solution 1

Why not using remote_directory resource. It's intended exactly for that.

See: https://docs.chef.io/resource_remote_directory.html

Solution 2

file_cache_path will tell you where the cookbooks are located on the target machine

Therefore you just need to sync your cookbook's directory within file_cache_path to your target location. You could do that with a cp -r, a ruby_block using FileUtils#cp_r, or some other cleverness I haven't thought of.

Comments

[Steve Bennett]

Hmm. Well, it turns out that directories under files/default aren't copied to the target machine anyway. Maybe the simplest way would be to provide all the files in a zip, copy that, then unzip it.

[Steve Bennett]

That looks right - is it new by any chance? Also it seems that remote_file and remote_directory behave completely differently (let alone cookbook_file and file). What a confusing mess...

[Michael Field]

It is confusing. There are a lot of discussions about that. Anyway - you should check Puppet. That's synonym for "messy" :)