Chef/Correctness/ExecuteDeleteFile

Cookstyle cops page

The Cookstyle cops department: Chef/Correctness

Use the file or directory resources built into Chef Infra Client with the :delete action to remove files and directories instead of shelling out to rm. The resources are idempotent, report correctly on what they changed, and work without a shell.

The two resources are not interchangeable and the one you pick has to match what is on disk. directory asserts the path really is a directory before deleting, so it raises Cannot delete directory[...] on a file even with recursive true, and file calls File.delete, so it raises Errno::EISDIR on a directory. A directory delete also needs recursive true for anything that isn’t empty, or it raises Errno::ENOTEMPTY.

Only a single rm of one path is flagged. A command containing a glob, a shell operator, or anything beyond the one deletion is left alone, since the file and directory resources can’t express those.

Examples

# bad -- rm without -r, which the shell will not let you point at a directory
execute 'rm /etc/foo.conf'

# good
file '/etc/foo.conf' do
  action :delete
end

# bad -- a recursive rm of a directory
execute 'delete the thing' do
  command 'rm -rf /opt/thing'
end

# good
directory '/opt/thing' do
  recursive true
  action :delete
end

Configurable attributes