chef-solo not updating postgres pg_hba.conf - postgresql

Question

I am using Chef Solo to provision a Vagrant Virtual Machine. Here is the relevant Vagrantfile snippet:
chef.run_list = [
"databox::default",
"mydbstuff"
]
chef.json = {
"postgresql": {
"config" : {
"listen_addresses": "*"
},
"pg_hba": [
{"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "postgres", "addr": null, "method": "ident"},
{"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "all", "addr": null, "method": "md5"},
{"type": "host", "db": "all", "user": "all", "addr": "127.0.0.1/32", "method": "md5"},
{"type": "host", "db": "all", "user": "all", "addr": "::1/128", "method": "md5"},
{"type": "local", "db": "all", "user": "vagrant", "addr": null, "method": "ident"},
{"type": "host", "db": "all", "user": "all", "addr": "192.168.248.1/24", "method": "md5"}
]
},
"databox": {
"db_root_password": "abc123",
"databases": {
"postgresql": [
{ "username": "db1", "password": "abc123", "database_name": "db1" },
{ "username": "db2", "password": "abc123", "database_name": "db2" }
]
}
}
}
The mydbstuff::default recipe looks like this:
postgresql_connection_info = {
:host => "localhost",
:port => node['postgresql']['config']['port'],
:username => 'postgres',
:password => node['postgresql']['password']['postgres']
}
postgresql_database_user 'vagrant' do
connection postgresql_connection_info
password 'vagrant'
action :create
end
node['databox']['databases']['postgresql'].each do |db|
postgresql_database_user 'vagrant' do
connection postgresql_connection_info
action :grant
database_name db.database_name
end
end
I am trying to allow connections by the local vagrant user without a password, and by any user from the VirtualBox private network. The pg_hba array in my chef.json has four lines that are copied from the default configuration and two lines to do the other stuff that I want to do. If I add these two lines to the pg_hba.conf file manually, they work just fine.
The problem is that my changes aren't actually written to the pg_hba.conf file. What's preventing them from being written?

Answer 1

It appears that the databox cookbook overwrites the Postgres permissions array using node.set instead of just modifying the part that it needs.
I have submitted a pull request to the project to change this behavior so that additional entries can be added to the file.

Answer 2

I faced same problem with chef-solo. My way out was to create a template for pg_hba.conf and replaced at the end of execution of recipe.