Using data bags

There are situations where you have data that you neither want to hardcode in your recipes nor store as attributes in your cookbooks. Users, external servers, or database connections are examples of such data. Chef offers so-called data bags to manage arbitrary collections of data, which you can use with your cookbooks.

Let's see how we can create and use a data bag and its items.

Getting ready

In the following example, we want to illustrate the usage of data bags by sending HTTP requests to a configurable HTTP endpoint. We don't want to hardcode the HTTP endpoint in our recipe. That's why we store it as a data bag item in a data bag.

To be able to follow along with the example, you'll need an HTTP endpoint.

One way to establish an HTTP endpoint is to just run sudo nc –l 80 on any server that is accessible by your node and use its IP address below.

Another way to establish an HTTP endpoint, which shows us the requests we make, is a free service called RequestBin. To use it, follow...