Using the node Search Index on Windows Stacks - AWS OpsWorks

Using the node Search Index on Windows Stacks

Important

The AWS OpsWorks Stacks service reached end of life on May 26, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We strongly recommend customers migrate their workloads to other solutions as soon as possible. If you have questions about migration, reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

Note

This example assumes that you have already done the Running a Recipe on a Windows Instance example. If not, you should do that example first. In particular, it describes how to enable RDP access to your instances.

This example is based on a Windows stack with a single custom layer and one instance. It uses Chef search with the node search index to obtain the server's public IP address and puts the address in a file in the C:\tmp directory. The following briefly summarizes how to create the stack for this example. For more information, see Create a New Stack.

Create a stack

  1. Open the AWS OpsWorks Stacks console and choose Add Stack.

  2. Specify the following settings, accept the defaults for the other settings, and choose Add Stack.

    • Name – NodeSearch

    • Region – US West (Oregon)

      This example will work in any region, but we recommend using US West (Oregon) for tutorials.

    • Default operating system – Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

  3. Choose Add a layer and add a custom layer to the stack with the following settings.

    • Name – IPTest

    • Short name – iptest

  4. Add a 24/7 t2.micro instance with default settings to the IPTest layer and start it. It will be named iptest1.

    AWS OpsWorks Stacks automatically assigns AWS-OpsWorks-RDP-Server to this instance, which allows authorized users to log in to the instance.

  5. Choose Permissions and then Edit, and select SSH/RDP and sudo/admin. Regular users need this authorization in addition to the AWS-OpsWorks-RDP-Server security group to log in to the instance.

    Note

    You also can log in as Administrator, but it requires a different procedure. For more information, see Logging In with RDP.

To set up the cookbook

  1. Create a directory named nodesearch and navigate to it.

  2. Create a metadata.rb file with the following content and save it to opstest.

    
name "nodesearch"
version "0.1.0"

  3. Create a recipes directory within nodesearch.

  4. Create a default.rb file with the following recipe and save it to the recipes directory.

    
directory 'C:\tmp' do
  rights :full_control, 'Everyone'
  recursive true
  action :create
end

windowsserver = search(:node, "hostname:iptest*").first
Chef::Log.info("**********The public IP address is: '#{windowsserver[:ipaddress]}'**********")

file 'C:\tmp\addresses.txt' do
  content "#{windowsserver[:ipaddress]}"
  rights :full_control, 'Everyone'
  action :create
end

    The recipe does the following:

    1. Uses a directory resource to create a C:\tmp directory for the file.

      For more information on this resource, see Example 3: Creating Directories.

    2. Uses Chef search with the node search index to obtain a list of nodes (instances) with a hostname that starts with iptest.

      If you use the default theme, which creates hostnames by appending integers to the layer's short name, this query will return every instance in the IPTest layer. For this example, the layer is known to have only one instance, so the recipe simply assigns the first one to windowsserver. For multiple instances, you can get the complete list and then enumerate them.

    3. Adds a message with the IP address to the Chef log for this run.

      The windowsserver object is a hash table whose ipaddress attribute is set to the instance's public IP address, so you can represent that address in the subsequent recipe code as windowsserver[:ipaddress]. The recipe inserts the corresponding string into the message and adds it to the Chef log.

    4. Uses the file resource to create a file with the IP address named C:\tmp\addresses.txt.

      The resource's content attribute specifies content to be added to the file, which is the public IP address in this case.

  5. Create a .zip archive of nodesearch, Upload the archive to an S3 bucket, make the archive public, and record the archive's URL.

    Content delivered to Amazon S3 buckets might contain customer content. For more information about removing sensitive data, see How Do I Empty an S3 Bucket? or How Do I Delete an S3 Bucket?.

You can now install the cookbook and run the recipe.

To install the cookbook and run the recipe

  1. Edit the stack to enable custom cookbooks and specify the following settings.

    • Repository type – S3 Archive

    • Repository URL – The cookbook archive URL that you recorded earlier

    Accept the default values for the other settings, and choose Save to update the stack configuration.

  2. Run the Update Custom Cookbooks stack command, which installs the current version of your custom cookbooks on the stack's instances, including online instances. If an earlier version of your cookbooks is present, this command overwrites it.

  3. After Update Custom Cookbooks has finished, execute the recipe by running the Execute Recipes stack command with Recipes to execute set to nodesearch::default. This command initiates a Chef run, with a run list that consists of your recipe. Leave the execute_recipes page open.

After the recipe has run successfully, you can verify it.

To verify nodesearch

  1. Examine the Chef log for the most recent execute_recipes event. On the Running command execute_recipes page, choose show in the iptest1 instance's Log column to display the log. Scroll down to find your log message near the bottom, which will look something like the following.

    
...
[2015-05-13T18:55:47+00:00] INFO: Storing updated cookbooks/nodesearch/recipes/default.rb in the cache.
[2015-05-13T18:55:47+00:00] INFO: Storing updated cookbooks/nodesearch/metadata.rb in the cache.
[2015-05-13T18:55:47+00:00] INFO: **********The public IP address is: '192.0.0.1'**********
[2015-05-13T18:55:47+00:00] INFO: Processing directory[C:\tmp] action create (nodesearch::default line 1)
[2015-05-13T18:55:47+00:00] INFO: Processing file[C:\tmp\addresses.txt] action create (nodesearch::default line 10) 
...

  2. Use RDP to log in to the instance and examine the contents of C:\tmp\addresses.txt.