CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubywindowschef-infra
BrianJakovich
BrianJakovich

Reputation: 1614

Chef: Insufficient permissions creating a directory in C:

I'm experiencing an error while trying to create a directory in C:\Program Files using Chef. I am running chef from a powershell environment as Administrator, so there shouldn't be any restrictions as to what actions I can perform.

recipes/default.rb

directory node['app']['unzip_path'] do
  action :create
end

attributes/default.rb

default['app']['unzip_path'] = 'C:/Program files/App'

I'm getting this error:

[2013-06-25T01:51:13+00:00] FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::InsufficientPermissions: directory[C:/Program files/App] (app::agent line 15) had an error: Chef::Exceptions::InsufficientPermissions: Cannot create directory[C:/Program files/App] at C:/Program files/App due to insufficient permissions

Additional question: Does chef-solo run as the user running the powershell command or is it running as a special "chef" user

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2210

Answers (3)

Miguel Alejandro Saldivar Vald
Miguel Alejandro Saldivar Vald

Reputation: 1

My workaround for this kind of issue with chef not allowing you to make changes inside C:\Program Files\ is to create a simple batch script file like:

@ECHO OFF
MKDIR "C:\\Program Files\\YourDirectory"
:END

And name it programfiles_yourdirectory.bat.erb, then Add it under templates on your cookbook and on the recipe call it like:

template "C:\\chef\\cache\\programfiles_yourdirectory.bat" do
  source "programfiles_yourdirectory.bat.erb"
  rights :full_control, "Administrators"
end

execute "Create Program Files_YourDirectory Directory" do
  cwd "C:\\chef\\cache"
  command "programfiles_yourdirectory.bat"
  action :run
  not_if do ::File.exists?('C:\Program Files\YourDirectory') end
end

This will create a bat template inside chef\cache folder, then chef-client will run the bat file with Admin rights meaning that the folder will be created without prompting for chef insufficient permissions.

Upvotes: 0

yoniLavi
yoniLavi

Reputation: 2752

Following up on BrianJakovich's answer. The mkdir_p call should preserve idempotence in either case, but using a ruby block will probably be better since it will run at the convergence phase:

ruby_block "hack to mkdir on windows" do
    block do
        FileUtils.mkdir_p node['app']['unzip_path']
    end
end

Upvotes: 3

BrianJakovich
BrianJakovich

Reputation: 1614

Per http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3787?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel it looks like this is a bug. My resolution to this is to just go the ruby route

require 'fileutils'
FileUtils.mkdir_p node['app']['unzip_path']

The problem here is that I lose the idempotence property that chef's directory resource provides, but if you need to put stuff into program files, this seems to be the only route for now

Upvotes: 1

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