Overview

In Chef, Resources represent a piece of system state and Providers are the underlying implementation which brings them into that state. For example, all database vendors support the abstract concept of database creation, but the underlying implementation is different for each.

While typical Resources and Providers are implemented in Chef's core using Ruby classes, implementing Lightweight Resources and Providers (LWRP) is quick and easy, requiring less Ruby knowledge than their heavier counterparts. (LWRP's also become Ruby classes, but this is done for you, behind the scenes).

This document covers the DSL for creating Resources and Providers. It is not meant to be an in-depth description of the implementation, but details are sprinkled throughout for the curious reader.

For the Light-weight Resources and Providers (LWRPs) in Opscode's public open source cookbooks, see Opscode LWRP Resources.

File Locations

Lightweight Resources and Providers are loaded from files in a Cookbook's "resources" and "providers" directories. Resource and Provider names combine the cookbook name and the file name with an underscore. The only exception to this convention are files named 'default.rb'. In this case, the Resource or Provider is named according to the cookbook name only.

Examples

Note: there is no default LWRP for the AWS cookbook; they are referenced only for illustrating how names correspond.

Resources

A Resource can be thought of as an abstract interface. Each is defined by its attributes and their validation rules, as well as the names of the actions it can take.

Keyword: actions

Actions are specified using the "actions" keyword followed by a comma-separated list of names. For example, the line

specifies that the list of allowed actions for this resource should include foo and bar and ultimately corresponds to the implementing Provider's "action_foo" and "action_bar" methods.

Note: several "actions" declarations will append to, not overwrite, the list of allowed actions.

Keyword: attribute

Attributes are specified using the "attribute" keyword followed by the attribute's name and an optional set of validation rules. For example, the line

creates an attribute named foo, accessible to the implementing Provider via the resource's "foo" method, with no validation; whereas, the line

creates an attribute named bar (accessible to the implementing Provider via the resource's "bar" method) that enforces that values specified in recipes must be of type String.

Validation parameters

The full set of options that can be passed to the attribute keyword in order to validate a parameter set on a Resource in a Recipe is:

Default Provider when invoking an LWR in a Recipe

If you omit the provider attribute when using an LWR in a recipe, Chef will look for an LWP of the same name in the same cookbook by default.

So, you can write:

instead of:

Example, creating a Lightweight Resource

In order to demonstrate, let's contrast the implementation of the existing (heavyweight) File Resource with a Lightweight Resource of the same functionality:

The above code is simple, traditional ruby--no magic at all. We are creating a number of getter/setter methods and validating that the inputs match some criteria (a regex, a string, true/false, etc.). The lightweight version looks like:

Hopefully this is simpler to write and understand.

Providers

Background

The chef-client runs in two stages:

1. The compilation phase, in which the client examines each Recipe in order and adds its Resources to the ResourceCollection
2. The execution phase, in which the client iterates over the ResourceCollection and performs the following:
   1. Based on the Resource's "provider" attribute, a new instance of the specified Provider is created (if the attribute is not set, one is selected based on the local platform). The originating Resource is stored in the new Provider as the @new_resource instance variable and is accessible when writing LWPs as new_resource.name, for example.
   2. The load_current_resource method is then called on the provider instance, giving it an opportunity to populate @current_resource with a new resource that represents the current state of the relevant part of the system.
   3. For each action specified in @new_resource.actions, the action_ method that corresponds to each action is called (e.g. action :create will invoke the action_create method of the Provider instance.)

Keyword: action

Actions are defined using the "action" keyword. Attributes from the originating Resource are accessible through the @new_resource instance variable, or, more idiomatically, simply as new_resource (see example below).

Default Action

The DSL doesn't provide a semantic for specifying a default action. If you would like to specify a particular action to be the default for the resource, create an initialize method in the resource's .rb file. For example, to have the :create action from the file resource above be the default (as it is in the Chef library itself):

In-line Resources in Provider Actions

The Recipe DSL has been extended to Providers, meaning Resources can be constructed and executed in-line in the bodies of Provider actions (see example using the "execute" Resource below.)

Implementation

For the curious, when a Provider references new Resources in-line, they are inserted into the ResourceCollection in order of appearance after the currently-executing Resource. For example, if after phase 1, the ResourceCollection contains the Resources [A,B] and during phase 2, the action run on A's Provider references Resources C and D in-line, the ResourceCollection (and execution order) will end up as [A,C,D,B].

Example, creating a Lightweight Provider

Taking the database example, our Resource might be defined by:

A mysql Provider might look like:

This would create a new Provider (Chef::Provider::OpscodeMysql) with a load_current_resource that does nothing, along with two methods, action_create and action_delete. When either of these methods is invoked, the corresponding block is executed, including properly resolving @new_resource.

Using our resource in a recipe:

Would create a database called monkeynews. It would also allow you to trivially switch out the database back-end.

Further Reading

View slides from a talk on Understanding LWRP Development