I’ve been playing around with Chef Solo on Fedora and executing the following:

sudo chef-solo -c config/solo.rb -j config/node.json

(where node.json just contains the example code from the resolver example on the Chef documentation page and the cookbooks folder contains all the opscode cookbooks.)

leads to the following error:

...
ERROR: Running exception handlers
ERROR: Exception handlers complete
FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /home/mark/chef-solo/chef-stacktrace.out
FATAL: ArgumentError: Attribute domain is not defined!

A bit of googling led me to believe that this error is happening because the machine doesn’t have a fully qualified domain name (fqdn) defined which can be seen by calling the following command:

$ hostname -f
> hostname: Name of service not known

One way to fix it is to add the following entry to /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1	mark-fedora

Which results in the script running fine with no errors.

...
INFO: Running report handlers
INFO: Report handlers complete

A suggestion I read while googling about fqdn was to add the hostname of the machine into a file called /etc/HOSTNAME but that didn’t seem to have any impact for me.

On the Mac hostname -f works fine even without an entry like the above in /etc/hosts so I’m not entirely sure how it all works!

If anyone could explain it to me that’d be awesome.

Source: http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2011/06/18/chef-fedora-and-argumenterror-attribute-domain-is-not-defined/