Check the file changed using chef-client

Question

I have the following scenario:

Suppose i have configuration file A which is copied during sever provisioning at any location example: "/temp" using chef recipes and after someday someone modified 2-3 parameter in the configuration file.

Is this possible to find out such files and rollback to old one or copied A file again to the /temp location.

Thanks

Answer 1

If file A is managed by your chef recipe then running chef-client again will correct any drift in the file to whatever is in your chef recipe for it's contents.

For example if you have:

file '/tmp/fileA.txt' do
  content 'foo'
  action :create
end

Then someone changes the content of /tmp/fileA.txt to bar then on your next chef-client run it will update the content to foo again.

Or if you are pulling in a file from the cookbook like:

cookbook_file '/tmp/fileA.txt' do
  source 'fileA.txt'
  action :create
end

Then someone updates /tmp/fileA.txt the next time you run chef-client it will pull the file from your cookbook again.

Or if you want to use a locally stored file you can do that as well:

remote_file '/tmp/fileA.txt' do
  source 'file:///tmp/fileAsource.txt'
  action :create
end

Here the file:///tmp/fileAsource.txt syntax is referring to the local filesystem file /tmp/fileAsource.txt. If the content changes from whats in the source file it will update /tmp/fileA.txt