How to unzip tar.Z file through CHEF cookbooks

Question

I'm using a Chef hosted server, a workstation and nodes and have run cookbooks on the nodes to install Java, update hosts file. I'm not able to find a reference in sites to unzip tar files. Could you please help me out here or direct to some site which has the information.

Thanks in advance.

Istic

Answer 1

There's actually nothing built into Chef for doing extracting a tar file. You have two options, either you can use the execute resource to shell out and untar or use some community cookbook like the tar cookbook that have custom resources defined for extracting tars.

In the execute resource example it might look something like

execute 'extract_some_tar' do
  command 'tar xzvf somefile.tar.gz'
  cwd '/directory/of/tar/here'
  not_if { File.exists?("/file/contained/in/tar/here") }
end

Whereas the third party tar cookbook definitely reads nicer

tar_package 'http://pgfoundry.org/frs/download.php/1446/pgpool-3.4.1.tar.gz' do
  prefix '/usr/local'
  creates '/usr/local/bin/pgpool'
end

Fleischer

The tar cookbook isn't actively under development any more. And I cannot get it to work with local extraction so the variant with execution of the tar command was working for me. There are alternative cookbooks (like tarball-chef-cookbook but that isn't part of the supermarket and does not support custom tar parameters. – Bemire

Answer 2

Since Chef Client 15.0 there is a archive_file resource built-in. It supports tar, gzip, bzip, and zip.

archive_file 'Precompiled.zip' do
  path '/tmp/Precompiled.zip'
  destination '/srv/files'
end

Square

Answer 3

Firstly the package 'tar' needs to be installed and then we can use chef's execute resource to run the tar command. You could use the following snippet.

package 'tar'
execute "extract tar" do
 command 'tar -xf #{tarPath} -C #{installPath}'
end 

Disproportionate

Answer 4

Below chef resource works absolutely fine

execute "Extract tar file" do
  command "tar -xzvf #{Chef::Config['file_cache_path']}/temp.tgz -C #{Chef::Config['file_cache_path']}/temp"
  action :run
end

'temp.tgz' archive file will get extracted into 'temp' dir

path for '#{Chef::Config['file_cache_path']}' would be like /root/.chef/local-mode-cache/cache/ on linux distributions.

Coldiron