Inspecting the results of your last Chef run

When developing new cookbooks, we need to know what exactly went wrong when a Chef client run fails.

Even though Chef prints all the details to stdout, you might want to look at it again, for example, after clearing your shell window.

Getting ready

You need to have a broken cookbook in your node's run list; any invalid piece of Ruby code will do:

Nil.each {}

How to do it...

Carry out the following steps:

1. Run the Chef client with your broken cookbook:

   user@server:~$ sudo chef-client
   ================================================================================
   Recipe Compile Error in /var/chef/cache/cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb
   ================================================================================
   NoMethodError
   -------------
   undefined method `each' for nil:NilClass
   
   Cookbook Trace:
   ---------------
     /var/chef/cache/cookbooks/my_cookbook/recipes/default.rb:7:in `from_file'
   
   Relevant File Content:
   ----------------------
   /var/chef...