Chef Recipe: File not found issue (does not contain a file at any of these locations)

Question

I'm trying to bootstrap a machine with a recipe that contains a call to cookbook_ file resource with action:create. The following issue occurs during execution (some information has been redacted):

FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::FileNotFound: cookbook_file[/path/to/file]
(XXXX::default line 25) had an error: Chef::Exceptions::FileNotFound:
Cookbook 'XXXX' (0.1.0) does not contain a file at any of these
locations:   files/default/file   files/second_folder/file

I checked my /chef/cookbooks/cookbook_name/recipe/files/default and /second_folder directories, and the files required are there, but Chef is just refusing to recognize them. I'm not sure what could be causing this issue. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Default folder solution

Your source file file should be placed on your cookbook at:

cookbook_name/files/default/file

Then you should use the cookbook_file as follow:

cookbook_file "/home/user/file") do
   source 'file'
   owner 'root'
   group 'root'
   mode '0644'
   action :create
end

---

Custom folder solution

You can also place your file on a different folder from default one as your second_folder for example:

cookbook_name/files/second_folder/file

This way you should specify on source also the not default directory as follow:

cookbook_file "/home/user/file") do
   source 'second_folder/file'
   owner 'root'
   group 'root'
   mode '0644'
   action :create
end

Answer 2

Check ignore files you might have inherited from cookbook template. In my case the error was to not able finding an xml file and I had *.xml in both ignore files chefignore and .gitignore