<srbaker>SOLVED</srbaker>

environments_production.rb

default_attributes chef_user: "ubuntu"
default_attributes { ... a whole mess of other stuff which apparently blows away the first line. whoops }

myproblem

when recipes_rbenv.rb is loaded, node['chef_user'] is nil. However I can see a
chef_user attribute if I look at the node information on the chef server. I've 
also tried passing {'chef_user' => 'ubuntu'} to default_attributes in case it
was a problem with string vs symbol for the key. No luck. Any ideas how I can
get the value of this attribute that's set in the environment's default_attributes?

recipes_rbenv.rb

node.default['rbenv']['user_installs'] = [
  {'user' => node['chef_user'] }                                                                                                                      
]

thanks for the reply @fujin

well I reference chef_user a bunch of places, including in my own templates. I'm pretty confused because I thought this worked just fine when I did a knife bootstrap and along with a couple other chef-client updates, but now it's not working. I'm under the impression that chef can't / shouldn't just stop working like that so I'm not really sure what's going on.

But anyway yeah there are like 15 references to chef_user in other recipes, so I do need to sort out how to get the recipe to read the attribute as set in the environment.

here's what I get when I include puts node.debug_value(:chef_user) in the recipe. Not sure what I'm looking for to tell you the truth…

set_unless_enabled?
false
default
not_present
env_default
not_present
role_default
not_present
force_default
not_present
normal
not_present
override
not_present
role_override
not_present
env_override
not_present
force_override
not_present
automatic
not_present

okay got it sorted, you can't call default_attributes twice in an environment file, the second call will blow away the first one