Service doesn't start when using chef

Question

I've written a script which I trigger as a service. When I call service myservice start the service starts fine. However, when the same service is triggered using chef, the service doesnt start. My chef service code looks like this

service "myservice" do
 supports :status => true, :restart => true, :reload => true
 action [ :enable, :start ]
end

I call the script using knife bootstrap <ip> -r 'recipe[testservice]'. What am I missing here? Thanks for the help!

Solution

Most probably you have some errors in your /etc/init.d/myservice script. When you say that yourservice supports status command, chef will run service myservice status and check the exitcode. If it's 0, it assumes that the service is running. Your script should exit with nonzero code.

Comments

[Oin]

Could you say what platform you are running this on? And what chef version? The service provider might have something to do with it.

[Jay]

I use a Centos box. The chef version is 11.4.0.

[Oin]

In the output from knife bootstrap do you see a line with: INFO: service[myservice] restarted ?

[Jay]

I see this service[myservice] action start 172.16.13.251 (up to date)

[Jay]

for some reason chef thinks my service is running when its not.