A knife plugin to make working with data bags easier in a chef solo environment.

If you are looking for a full featured chef solo management solution, you may want to check out knife solo.

The standard chef gem includes the knife command and commands to manipulate data bags.

knife-solo_data_bag has the following advantages over the knife data bag command:

• allows recovery from errors when creating/editing JSON files,
• allows import and export of the the contents in JSON format.

• Versions >= 2 only support Ruby versions 2.2 and above. If you need o use an earlier Ruby version, use knife-solo_data_bag < 2.0.0.
• Starting with 1.0.0, knife solo data bag only supports Chef versions >= 11.4.0. If you need support for an earlier version of chef, use a knife solo data bag version < 1.0.0.

gem install knife-solo_data_bag

# or if using ChefDK
chef gem install knife-solo_data_bag

With Chef >= 12.x, you need to indicate that you're running in local mode, otherwise Chef will try to connect to a server.

In .chef/knife.rb, add:

local_mode       true

Create a plain text data bag

$ knife solo data bag create apps app_1

Create an encrypted data bag with the provided string as the secret

$ knife solo data bag create apps app_1 -s secret_key

Create an encrypted data bag with the provided file content as the secret

$ knife solo data bag create apps app_1 --secret-file 'SECRET_FILE'

Create a data bag item with JSON from the command line (works with encryption)

$ knife solo data bag create apps app_1 --json '{"id": "app_1", "username": "bob"}'

Create a data bag item from a json file

$ knife solo data bag create apps app_1 --json-file foo.json

Edit a plain text data bag

$ knife solo data bag edit apps app_1

Edit an encrypted data bag with the provided string as the secret

$ knife solo data bag edit apps app_1 -s secret_key

Edit an encrypted data bag with the provided file content as the secret

$ knife solo data bag edit apps app_1 --secret-file 'SECRET_FILE'

List data bags

$ knife solo data bag list

Show the plain text content of a data bag (if this is an encrypted data bag, it will return the encrypted data)

$ knife solo data bag show apps app_1

Show the unencrypted content of an encrypted data bag with the provided string as the secret

$ knife solo data bag show apps app_1 -s secret_key

Show the unencrypted content of an encrypted data bag with the provided file content as the secret

$ knife solo data bag show apps app_1 --secret-file 'SECRET_FILE'

You can also display any of the above variations in JSON format with -F json

$ knife solo data bag show apps app_1 -s secret_key -F json

You can load your data bags inside you recipes as follows:

app_1 = Chef::EncryptedDataBagItem.load("apps", "app_1").to_hash

By default, this plugin will use the configured data_bag_path. This is defaulted to /var/chef/data_bags by Chef. It is possible to override this path in your Chef client config if desired. When using this plugin, it is also possible to override the path using the --data-bag-path argument.

This plugin respects the "encrypted_data_bag_secret" configuration option in knife.rb. Command line secret arguments (-s or --secret-file) will override the setting in knife.rb.

This plugin has been tested on the following:

Chef:

• ~> 11.8
• ~> 12.16

Ruby:

• 2.1.8
• 2.2.2
• 2.3.0

OS:

• OSX
• Linux

Running tests requires an indication of the Gemfile to use:

export BUNDLE_GEMFILE=$PWD/gemfiles/Gemfile.chef.11.18.12
bundle
bundle exec rspec

• Fork the project
• Make your feature addition or bug fix (with tests and docs) in a topic branch
• Bonus points for not mucking with the gemspec or version
• Send a pull request

See LICENSE for details