Is it possible to easily access the information about the node (similar to knife node show) from a recipe without running knife through the "execute" resource? I would like to do this in order to add information about the current runlist and maybe some more details regarding the node into motd for convenience.
Specifically for the run_list, if you do not care about order, the most straight forward way would likely be to get this from the Ohai attributes.
node['recipes']
node['roles']
See: http://docs.getchef.com/ohai.html
If you do care about order, then you may have to operate off of the node object.
runlist = node.run_list
Which may not be as apparent from the docs.
You can access the rest of the node information in a similar manner.