Detect host operating system distro in chef-solo deploy bash script

Question

When deploying a chef-solo setup you need to switch between using sudo or not eg:

    bash install.sh  

and

    sudo bash install.sh

Depending on the distro on the host server. How can this be automated?

Solution

ohai already populates these attributes and are readily available in your recipe for example,

"platform": "centos",
"platform_version": "6.4",
"platform_family": "rhel",

you can reference to these as

 if node[:platform_family].include?("rhel")
    ...
 end

To see what other attributes ohai sets, just type

 ohai

on the command line.