Using AWS OpsWorks Stacks-Specific Search Indexes on Windows Stacks - AWS OpsWorks

Using AWS OpsWorks Stacks-Specific Search Indexes 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.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks provides the following search indexes in addition to node:

  • aws_opsworks_stack – The stack configuration.

  • aws_opsworks_layer – The stack's layer configurations.

  • aws_opsworks_instance – The stack's instance configurations.

  • aws_opsworks_app – The stack's app configurations.

  • aws_opsworks_user – The stack's user configurations.

  • aws_opsworks_rds_db_instance – Connection information for registered RDS instances.

These indexes include some standard Chef attributes, but are primarily intended for retrieving AWS OpsWorks Stacks-specific attributes. For example aws_opsworks_instance includes a status attribute that provides the instance's status, such as online.

Note

The recommended practice is to use node when possible to keep your recipes consistent with standard Chef usage. For an example, see Using the node Search Index on Windows Stacks.

This example shows how to use the AWS OpsWorks Stacks indexes to retrieve the value of an AWS OpsWorks Stacks-specific attribute. It is based on a simple Windows stack with a custom layer that has one instance. It uses Chef search to obtain the instance's AWS OpsWorks Stacks ID and puts the results in the Chef log.

The following briefly summarizes how to create a stack for this example. For more information, see Create a New Stack.

Create a stack

  1. Open the AWS OpsWorks Stacks console and choose + Stack. Specify the following settings, accept the defaults for the other settings, and choose Add Stack.

    • Name – IDSearch

    • 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

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

    • Name – IDCheck

    • Short name – idcheck

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

    AWS OpsWorks Stacks automatically assigns AWS-OpsWorks-RDP-Server to this instance. Enabling RDP Access explains how to add an inbound rule to this security group that allows authorized users to log in to the instance.

  4. Choose Permissions and then Edit, and choose 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 can also 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 idcheck and navigate to it.

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

    
name "idcheck"
version "0.1.0"

  3. Create a recipes directory within idcheck and add a default.rb file to the directory that contains the following recipe.

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

    The recipe uses Chef search with an aws_opsworks_instance search index to obtain the instance attributes of each instance in the stack with a hostname that starts with idcheck. 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 IDCheck 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.

    The recipe takes advantage of the fact that there is only one instance in the stack with this hostname, so the first result is the correct one. If your stack has multiple instances, searching on other attributes might return more than one result. For a list of instance attributes, see Instance Data Bag (aws_opsworks_instance).

    The instance attributes are basically a hash table, and the instance's AWS OpsWorks Stacks ID is assigned to the instance_id attribute, so you can refer to the ID as windowsserver[:instance_id]. The recipe inserts the corresponding string into the message and adds it to the Chef log.

  4. Create a .zip archive of the ipaddress cookbook, Upload the archive to an Amazon S3 bucket, and record the archive's URL. For more information on cookbook repositories, see Cookbook Repositories.

    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 is finished, execute the recipe by running the Execute Recipes stack command with Recipes to execute set to idcheck::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 by examining 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.


...
[2015-05-13T20:03:47+00:00] INFO: Storing updated cookbooks/nodesearch/recipes/default.rb in the cache.
[2015-05-13T20:03:47+00:00] INFO: Storing updated cookbooks/nodesearch/metadata.rb in the cache.
[2015-05-13T20:03:47+00:00] INFO: **********The instance ID is: 'i-8703b570'**********
[2015-05-13T20:03:47+00:00] INFO: Chef Run complete in 0.312518 seconds 
...