Idempotence in Chef on Windows via WMI / Powershell - Light at at the end of the tunel

As part of writing Chef recipes, the big thing is to run code once and only once.

Well, Chef is Ruby, running on top of windows. To make things more interesting, the native wmi providers come in the form of a community GEMs.

Example:

only_if { WMI::Win32_Service.find(:first, :conditions => {:name => 'chef-client'}).nil? }

The best way to find / test WMI functionality is with Powershell... Well..Here are a few things that make life just a little easier:


1: This bad boy automatically generates WMI query in powershell. Talk about free.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730935.aspx
Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24121

2: Which namespace should you use???

Powershell 3 (Server 2008+) gives you the answer for free!!!!
Example1: Get-CimClass -MethodName *bios*
Example2: Get-CimClass -ClassName *bios*

What do you get?

    NameSpace: ROOT/cimv2

CimClassName                        CimClassMethods      CimClassProperties
------------                                  ---------------               ------------------
Win32_SMBIOSMemory       {SetPowerState, R...   {Caption, Descripti
CIM_BIOSElement                 {}                                {Caption, Descripti
Win32_BIOS                           {}                                {Caption, Descripti
CIM_VideoBIOSElement       {}                                {Caption, Descripti

You get a free Powershell Query:

 

Holy Crap!! That was easy.