How to force actions on "up to date" resources in Chef?

Question

In the following code, I create a service that I would like to start only after deploying files that it depends upon, and to restart it whenever those files change. This very basic recipe does not work as I'd expect:

supervisor_service "test-service" do command "/bin/cat" autostart false action :enable end cookbook_file "/tmp/test.txt" do source "test.txt" notifies :restart, 'supervisor_service[test-service]' end 

At the end of the run, chef-client only logs:

• supervisor_service[test-service] action restart (up to date)

...and the service is not run. A manual sudo supervisorctl restart test-service works fine.

As far as I'm concerned a restart action is a request for the resource to change state (enabled -> started), what is the correct way to express this to Chef?

EDIT: I thought it would be worth adding that using the :immediately modifier causes the action to execute correctly. However in practice I have multiple files that may trigger a restart, and I need all of them to be updated before restarting (exactly the behaviour :delayed is meant to provide).

Answer 1

I'm using Chef 10.14.4 and I get the same problems as you. What version are you using?

The notification does appear in the log file, as if it's about to run the :restart action on the supervisor_service provider:

INFO: cookbook_file[/tmp/test.txt] sending restart action to supervisor_service[test-service] (delayed) INFO: Processing supervisor_service[test-service] action restart (temp::default line 16) 

but then we simply get:

INFO: Chef Run complete in 14.302624 seconds 

In the mean time, the best I could get working is:

supervisor_service "test-service" do command "/bin/cat" autostart false action :enable end execute "restart test-service" do command "supervisorctl restart test-service" user "root" action :nothing end cookbook_file "/tmp/test.txt" do source "test.txt" notifies :run, "execute[restart test-service]" end 

which is essentially the exact same code that is meant to run, but doesn't.

Since this works fine, but notifying the supervisor_service provider does not, one can only assume that a bug exists within this file in the supervisor cookbook (v0.4.0).