Chef stop and start service in sequence

I have the following lines in my recipe

service "apache" do
  action :stop
end

# Do something..

service "apache" do
  action :start
end

I found that the 2nd block is not executed. Any reason?

Solution 1:

Notifications are the right way to handle this.

Suppose you want to do the following:

• Conditionally download a file
• If the file is downloaded
  • Stop apache immediately
  • Process the file (e.g. unzip it or move it)
  • Start apache again

You would do it like this:

# Define the apache service but don't do anything with it
service "apache" do
  action :nothing
end

# Define your post-fetch script but don't actually do it
execute "process my file" do
   ... your code here
  action :nothing
  notifies :start, "service[apache]"
end

# Fetch the file. Maybe the file won't be fetched because of not_if or checksum.
# In that case apache won't be stopped or started, it will just keep running.
remote_file "/tmp/myfile" do
  source "http://fileserver/myfile"
  notifies :stop, "service[apache]", :immediately
  notifies :run, execute["process my file"]
end

Solution 2:

The problem is that your resources have the same name. service "apache" is not unique, so chef is de-duplicating them. Your options are to give them separate names like this

service "apache stop" do
  service_name "apache"
  action :stop
end

# Do something

service "apache start" do
  service_name "apache"
  action :start
end

you could also use a notification from the "# Do something" block to send a :restart to the service "apache". That's the usual pattern people use, a single service, sending it notifications (or using subscribes). More here:

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Resources#Resources-Notifications

Solution 3:

Mray's and kgilpin's answers are perfect, but I ran into problems recently.

Somehow mysql service didn't stop before I needed to restart it and thus my recipe failed. I used workaround using '''Execute''' resource (I need recipes working on Ubuntu only). Execute is waiting for stop/start, while service could end earlier (init script will finish, while daemon not)

execute "Stop service" do
   command "service  stop"
end

I not proud for this solution, but it is working for me.

Solution 4:

To add to this;

Chef does not start a service unless /etc/init.d/<DAEMON> status returns something other than 0. If it returns 0 then chef assumes that it's running.