Installing rpm packages using chef (with dependencies)

Question

I have a list of rpm packages including dependencies. Locally I do rpm -i *.rpm and it works fine. How do I use the -i flag when I use chef's rpm_package resource. I cant use yum as we are trying something that works offline.

Just need a chef way for rpm -i.

Answer 1

You have two options:

Bash it

Just like you did in your question, you can use the bash resource to execute the rpm command. This is not idempotent by default and is (obviously) not cross-platform:

bash 'rpm -i *.rpm' do
  cwd '/path/to/that/directory'
end

Ruby it

Slightly less straightforward, you can use Ruby's native file system functions to traverse the tree:

Dir['/path/to/rpms/*.rpm'].each do |path|
  rpm_package File.basename(path) do
    source path
  end
end

This will iterate over each item in the given path that matches the glob.