How do I prevent my chef recipes from running during a reboot?

Background

Chef has it's own properties for checking if a machine is rebooting, or launching. Some people find this a little hard to understand and work with and will ask the question, 'How do I prevent my chef recipes from running during a reboot?'

Answer

It is generally a good idea to try and design your recipes along the lines of idempotency. The best way to do this, is to utilize not_if or only_if within your recipes, as that will ensure that the recipes are not run again. If you aren't familiar with either command, you can find some documentation on them, here:

https://docs.chef.io/resource_common.html#attributes

In addition to this, our own Chef Cookbooks Developer Guide is continually growing and contains lots of very useful information and guidance, on how you should write your chef recipes and cookbooks to work with RightScale.