littlechef Permission Denied when uploading solo.rb

I am testing my chef deployments with vagrant, and started out deploying with the vagrant user. I have tried to abstract away the user from vagrant, and am now trying to use a different user, creating when I bootstrap the box.

When I run fix node:123.123.123.123 using the vagrant user, everything runs perfectly fine, but when I run it using the chef user, (who owns the /etc/chef directory, and can sudo without a password) it fails with the error:

Fatal error: put() encountered an exception while uploading '<StringIO.StringIO instance at 0x10fecc200>'

Underlying exception:
    Permission denied

This exception is thrown around line 94 of solo.py:

upload_template(os.path.join(BASEDIR, 'solo.rb'), '/etc/chef/',
    context=data, use_sudo=True, backup=False, mode=0400)

Why does this happen even though the chef user has the correct permissions?

Apr 25 '12 00:04 rickbutton

The problem is caused by upload_template having two phases:

using put() to upload the file to the user's home directory
using sudo to move the file to its final destination dir at /etc/chef

Because you are using the chef user, which doesn't have a home directory, that step is failing. So the solution is to always use "real" system users, that is users which have a home directory.

On LittleChef's side, what we can do is catch that error and output a proper error message, as "Permission denied" is totally useless for a user encountering the problem.

Apr 25 '12 08:04 tobami

Ah, that makes sense. I don't have the means to test that yet, as my computer blew up about an hour after I opened the issue, but I'll try creating a user with a home and post results when I get a chance.

Apr 28 '12 03:04 rickbutton

Tried out creating a new user with a home directory, and it worked perfectly. Thanks!

I would recommend a more descriptive error message like you mentioned.

Apr 30 '12 01:04 rickbutton

Committed a partial fix (Ugly error still appears), and filed a bug in fabric (fabric/fabric#629), needed to be able to fix it more nicely on our side.

Will leave this open until then

Apr 30 '12 14:04 tobami

I'm still getting an error here, but not Permissions. I get the following:

$ fix --verbose node:10.14.209.171 deploy_chef
Are you sure you want to install Chef 0.10 at the node 10.14.209.171, using "precise" packages? [Y/n]
Setting up Opscode repository...
Installing Chef Solo

Fatal error: put() encountered an exception while uploading '<StringIO.StringIO instance at 0x108eef950>'

Underlying exception:
    unsupported operand type(s) for &: 'NoneType' and 'int'

Aborting.

Fatal error: Failed to upload '/etc/chef/solo.rb'
This can happen when the deployment user does not have a home directory, which is needed as a temporary location

Aborting.
Disconnecting from 10.14.209.171... done.

I have tried both directly as root and as a real user chef with sudo permissions. I can see that the template file exists in the home directory with a file name of a long hash, but it appears to fail on moving it to /etc/chef/solo.rb

Mar 07 '13 17:03 gondoi

Looks like I overlooked #151

Mar 07 '13 17:03 gondoi

Thanks @gondoi , I hope the LittleChef 1.5.0 release today fixes your issue.

Mar 08 '13 15:03 tobami