Chef 14 Upgrade: Custom Resource Properties are Silently Coerced to Hash if they are a nil

While upgrading to Chef 14, I found that nils are being silently coerced to an empty Hash, {}.

This can be seen where we have the following resource, ensuring that the provided tls_options is a Hash:

resource_name :caddy
provides :caddy
property :tls_options, Hash, default: {}

I originally had two test cases which would expect Chef to throw a ValidationFailed error if given a string or a nil:

describe 'cookbook-spectat::_caddy_resource' do
  context 'When TLS options are specified' do
    context 'as a string, not a Hash' do
      # ...

      it 'throws an error' do
        expect { chef_run.converge(described_recipe) }.to\
          raise_error(Chef::Exceptions::ValidationFailed, %r{Property tls_options must be one of: Hash})
      end
    end

    context 'as a nil, not a Hash' do
      # ...

      it 'throws an error' do
        expect { chef_run.converge(described_recipe) }.to\
          raise_error(Chef::Exceptions::ValidationFailed, %r{Property tls_options must be one of: Hash})
      end
    end
  end
end

However, when running it with Chef 14.5.33 (ChefDK 3.3.23), I noticed the test fails when we provide a nil:

1) cookbook-spectat::_caddy_resource When TLS options are specified as a nil, not a Hash throws an error
   Failure/Error:
     expect { chef_run.converge(described_recipe) }.to\
       raise_error(Chef::Exceptions::ValidationFailed, %r{Property tls_options must be one of: Hash})

     expected Chef::Exceptions::ValidationFailed with message matching /Property tls_options must be one of: Hash/ but nothing was raised
   # ./spec/unit/resources/caddy_spec.rb:1023:in `block (4 levels) in <top (required)>'

If we add some debugging in our resource we can see that tls_options is actually set to {}, rather than the nil that's provided to it.

This may not cause you any issues, but it may help you remove some dead logic to handle the nil case.

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#blogumentation #chef-14 #chef-14-upgrade #chefspec #test-coverage.

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