Chef Nginx cookbook - override version number - nginx

Question

I have developed a cookbook for my application which depends on Nginx cookbook. I have downloaded the Nginx cookbook from the following location
https://github.com/miketheman/nginx
and tried including the default recipe in my cookbook and overriding version attribute specified in the default attribute file. But irrespective of what i do, Nginx version 1.0.x is installed. I could not track from where it is fetching the version information. Can anyone help resolving this issue?
Thanks

Answer 1

If you specify the nginx cookbook as a dependency in your own wrapper cookbook, you have to deal with the strict load order of attribute files. Since Chef 11, all dependency cookbooks are loaded first, before the cookbook which requires them. As the dependency cookbooks (including nginx) are loaded, the attribute files are loaded and evaluated in this order:
attributes/default.rb of nginx
all other attributes files of nginx in alphabetical order
attributes/default.rb of your cookbook
all other attributes files of your cookbook in alphabetical order
As you can see, all the attributes of the nginx cookbook are initialized before your own attribute files are loaded. Thus, any dependent attributes (i.e. ones which are initializes using values of other existing attributes) use the values defined in the nginx cookbook, not your own.
Now, as you can see node['nginx']['source']['version'] is initialized with node['nginx']['version'] and thus uses the default value. This value is not changed if you just change node['nginx']['version'] later in your cookbook.
But fear not, there is a remedy :) You can reload specific attribute files in order to re-set their attributes. Here, this is rather convenient if you want to overwrite the nginx version. This is what I do in the attributes/default.rb in my nginx wrapper cookbook:
override['nginx']['version'] = '1.6.0'
override['nginx']['source']['checksum'] = '943ad757a1c3e8b3df2d5c4ddacc508861922e36fa10ea6f8e3a348fc9abfc1a'
# Reload nginx::source attributes with our updated version
node.from_file(run_context.resolve_attribute('nginx', 'source'))

Answer 2

from attributes/default.rb the default version is set to '1.4.4'
The simplest way to find out what version you've set it to is look for the following attribute on the chef-server UI:
['nginx']['version']
hopefully this should be set to whatever you've set it to!

Answer 3

I think that the real issue here is that the ['nginx']['version'] does not behave as you might expect it to.
According to the README file ...
If you use the nginx::default or nginx::repo recipes, you will load the latest binary package from either your platform's repository, or from the "stable" repo that is provided by the Nginx maintainers. The version attribute is effectively ignored!!.
The version attribute is only honoured if you use the nginx::source recipe, where it determines the URL of the source archive that is fetched and built.
If you use the nginx::ohai recipe, it updates the version attribute according to the version of Nginx that is currently installed.
Clear yet? If not then:
nginx::default gives you a (typically) old version of Nginx
nginx::repo gives you a (typically) more recent stable version of Nginx
nginx::source is the only recipe that allows you to specify the version of Nginx that you want.
If that doesn't seem to explain what you are seeing ... you need to dive into the recipe source code. The recipe behaviour (e.g. selection of installation repositories) varies across the different platforms / families.