Retrieve details of a runlist from a node using CHEF - attributes

Question

How to retrieve the names of all the cookbooks/profiles which are listed on a specific node's runlist using CHEF?
The ohai attribute node['recipes'] doesn't give me the list of recipes that are in the runlist of a specified node.
Is there any other way of retrieving the runlist of a specific node so that certain checks can be applied on the retrieved information of the runlist of a specific node?

Answer 1

Chef search can be done on the data indexed in the Chef Server using:
knife on workstations
knife command can be used on workstations to search node data. If the node name is known and we want to see the run_list attribute of the example node testbox1.home.net:
knife node show testbox1.home.net -a 'run_list'
If the node name is not known, but we know a cookbook is it's run_list. This will return nodes that match recipe[my_cookbook] in their run_list:
knife search node 'run_list:recipe\[my_cookbook\]'
search from clients through Chef recipes
Similar searches can be performed from within "recipes" using the search functionality.
If the node name is known and we want to fetch the run_list for testbox1.home.net. In my recipes/default.rb:
search(:node, 'name:testbox1*',
:filter_result => {
'name' => [ 'name' ],
'runlist' => [ 'run_list' ]
} ).each do |details|
puts "#{details['name']}: #{details['runlist']}"
end
If node name is not known, but we know that recipe[my_cookbook] is in it's run_list. In my recipes/default.rb:
search(:node, 'run_list:recipe\[cookbook1\]',
:filter_result => {
'name' => [ 'name' ],
'runlist' => [ 'expanded_run_list' ]
} ).each do |details|
puts "#{details['name']}: #{details['runlist']}"
end
Note: I have applied filters to extract only the data required for examples above. If :filter_result is omitted then complete information will be retrieved into details.