No way to idempotently remove a user

[jaylevitt]

If I add

"action": "remove"

to a user's data bag item, the first chef-client run will remove the user--but the second will raise an exception:

ArgumentError: user_account[notanymore] (user::data_bag line 27) had an error: ArgumentError: can't find user for notanymore

Shouldn't remove handle the case where the user's already been removed? Or is there a better way?

[davidc-donorschoose]

Aha! I was able to remove users idempotently using ignore_failure, which is one of the common attribute that can be set on any resource. I do still see an error such as this in stdout, but it's ignored and the chef-solo run continues:

ERROR: user_account[deleteme] (blueprint::default line 42) had an error: can't find user for deleteme

Example recipe code from my own blueprint cookbook, which depends on the user cookbook, so that I can use the user_account resource:

# Search data_bags/accounts/*.json for users to remove
remove_accounts = search(:users, "(action:remove)")

remove_accounts.each do |u|
  username = u['username'] || u['id']
  user_account username do
    action :remove
    # Idempotent in case the user is already removed.
    ignore_failure true
  end
end

[fnichol]

Looks like @atz had a great solution in #16 so that should close this out, woo!