enabling to give a new tag key to an EC2 instance created with knife, as well as set its name

please refer to: https://github.com/omrico1/knife-ec2/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/ec2_server_create.rb for resolution, again, I hope you will find it necessary and merge it in..

Hi, we'd really like to see this feature, it is marked as Resolved but I don't see anything in the github repo. Any chance this is going to be included? I noticed the master branch changed quite a bit, I can redo a patch if necessary.
Thanks

Since we are not seeing the code in master, can we assume that you have either rejected this feature or that it was mistakenly closed? If it will help, I can clone this ticket and re-work Omri's patch based on what is in master. Please let us know as "resolved" is a confusing status for something that looks like it was either rejected or forgotten.

Thanks,
Allen

Ah, sorry, I haven't contributed for a long time, I forgot http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/How+to+Contribute

-> ticket is marked as 'Resolved' waiting to be 'tested, verified, and merged' so we can expect this to be included sometime.

At the same time it has been marked as Resolved since March 30

I've opened a pull request here: https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/24

I do have a CLA.

Thanks

--Gilles

As far as we can tell, ec2 refers to these as tags and not 'machine roles'. We're concerned that this option sounds like a Chef role and not an EC2 option. Can you comment on this?

I agree. I would rather see arbitrary setting of many tags rather than just the name and a valueless tag being set by this patch.

My patch does not have the notion of roles https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/24

There is a trick for the 'Name' tag which is a very common tag when using EC2 but all the other tags are just a dictionnary

One thing about using the -N (chef_node_name) option to set the EC2 "name" tag, is that the Chef::Node#name will not be the instance-id, and the newly added --purge option will not delete the node and api client.

https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/ec2_server_delete.rb#L81-83

We may consider performing a search if finding the instance id for the node/client fails.

Purge could:

• look for a -N option and use that?
  OR
• try to delete instance_id
• get the 'Name' tag from the instance and try to delete that
• Do a search as you mentioned, delete the result
• (Or just do a search)

Forcing name == instance_id sort of defeats the purpose of -N when creating an instance

Love the --purge options by the way, thanks for that.

I've generated this pull request to add a tagging feature -
https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/29

This will allow you to specify tags with -T tag=value,tag=value.
Much like amazon's ec2 command line tools. It's based on this discussion -
https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/5

Marking resolved for review as there is a pull request attached.

Alright, I think we're all set now. Marked for merging.

I would like to get this feature into the next release. However, after looking at both available pull requests, I think we might still need to do some work:

1) https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/24/files fails with the following error:

$ knife ec2 server create -I ami-3962a950 -S steve -i ~/certificates/steve.pem -x ubuntu --tags Wombat,sauce -VV
DEBUG: Using configuration from /Users/sdanna/src/oc/steve-ocs/.chef/knife.rb
/Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/knife-ec2-0.5.11/lib/chef/knife/ec2_server_create.rb:199:in `run': undefined local variable or method `tags' for #<Chef::Knife::Ec2ServerCreate:0x007fd95d1e6430> (NameError)
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/chef-0.10.8/lib/chef/knife.rb:391:in `run_with_pretty_exceptions'
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/chef-0.10.8/lib/chef/knife.rb:166:in `run'
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/chef-0.10.8/lib/chef/application/knife.rb:128:in `run'
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/gems/chef-0.10.8/bin/knife:25:in `<top (required)>'
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/bin/knife:19:in `load'
        from /Users/sdanna/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290@global/bin/knife:19:in `<main>'

2) Both patches only try to set the Name attribute in the case where other tags have been set. This seems a bit counter intuitive to me when testing it. For instance calling:

knife ec2 server create -I some_AMI -S some_key -N MYCOOLNODENAME

does not set the Name tag. However,

knife ec2 server create -I some_AMI -S some_key -N MYCOOLNODENAME --tags completely=unrelated

does.

I believe there is some value in having the syntax be similar to the ec2 command line tools.

Marx: Can you fix up your branch related to point (2) above?

Please consider incorporating my changes based on the pull request above:

https://github.com/pumpkineater/knife-ec2/commits/master/

It works well. Always sets (atleast) the Name tag and displays it in list and delete output as well.

I have fixed my patch. We're currently using it actively (I created a separate plugin for the company, fixed the bug there and forgot to port it back).

I don't mind which one goes out, it would be nice to have any of them

Thanks

--Gilles

Reresolving.

MERGED! https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/commit/f9a9749987a97dfe8f364587ced87261173ee58c

Omri, Gilles, and Sam thanks for all of the work you put into getting this feature into shape. I ultimately committed Sam's branch as it was closest to the feature set I think we wanted.

It's a bit of a shame no one tried to fix "2) Both patches only try to set the Name attribute in the case where other tags have been set." before merging this

It makes no sense that if you do:

$ knife ec2 server create -I some_AMI -S some_key -N MYCOOLNODENAME

then the node ends up with a blank EC2 name. There's talk above that it will fall back to the instance-id as a name but this doesn't seem to be the case.

The fact you have to save some other dummy tag that you don't want (or duplicate the chef node name as a tag) just to get the name in there seems like a bug.

even adding both `N mynodename` and `-tags Name=mynodename` I still get a blank node name in `knife ec2 server list`

Looking at the code, it appears that the name /should/ get set even without other tags being set. Are you sure you aren't still using an older version of knife-ec2, possibly because of this bug: http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3255

I have previously followed instructions for building and installing knife ec2 from github HEAD

$ gem list knife-ec2

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

knife-ec2 (0.5.15)