Ubuntu Manpage: knife-search - The man page for the knife search subcommand.

NAME

knife-search - The man page for the knife search subcommand.

Search indexes allow queries to be made for any type of data that is indexed by the server, including
data bags (and data bag items), environments, nodes, and roles. A defined query syntax is used to support
search patterns like exact, wildcard, range, and fuzzy. A search is a full-text query that can be done
from several locations, including from within a recipe, by using the search subcommand in Knife, by using
the search functionality in the Management Console, or by using the /search or /search/INDEX endpoints in
the Chef Server API. The search engine is based on Apache Solr and is run from the server.

The knife search subcommand is used run a search query for information that is indexed on a server.

Common Options

The following options can be run with all Knife sub-commands and plug-ins:

-c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
The configuration file to use.

--color
Indicates that colored output will be used.

-d, --disable-editing
Indicates that $EDITOR will not be opened; data will be accepted as-is.

--defaults
Indicates that Knife will use the default value, instead of asking a user to provide one.

-e EDITOR, --editor EDITOR
The $EDITOR that is used for all interactive commands.

-E ENVIRONMENT, --environment ENVIRONMENT
The name of the environment. When this option is added to a command, the command will run only
against the named environment.

-f FILE_NAME, --file FILE_NAME
Indicates that the private key will be saved to a specified file name.

-F FORMAT, --format FORMAT
The output format: summary (default), text, json, yaml, and pp.

-h, --help
Shows help for the command.

-k KEY, --key KEY
The private key that Knife will use to sign requests made by the API client to the server.

--no-color
Indicates that color will not be used in the output.

-p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
The user password.

--print-after
Indicates that data will be shown after a destructive operation.

-s URL, --server-url URL
The URL for the server.

-u USER, --user USER
The user name used by Knife to sign requests made by the API client to the server. Authentication
will fail if the user name does not match the private key.

-v, --version
The version of the chef-client.

-V, --verbose
Set for more verbose outputs. Use -VV for maximum verbosity.

-y, --yes
Indicates that the response to all confirmation prompts will be "Yes" (and that Knife will not ask
for confirmation).

Syntax

This argument has the following syntax:

$ knife search INDEX SEARCH_QUERY

where INDEX is one of client, environment, node, role, or the name of a data bag and SEARCH_QUERY is the
search query syntax for the query that will be executed.

INDEX is implied if omitted, and will default to node. For example:

$ knife search '*:*' -i

will return something similar to:

8 items found

centos-62-dev
opensuse-1203
ubuntu-1304-dev
ubuntu-1304-orgtest
ubuntu-1204-ohai-test
ubuntu-1304-ifcfg-test
ohai-test
win2k8-dev

and is the same search as:

$ knife node search '*:*" -i

If the SEARCH_QUERY does not contain a colon character (:), then the default query pattern is
tags:*#{@query}* OR roles:*#{@query}* OR fqdn:*#{@query}* OR addresses:*#{@query}*, which means the
following two search queries are effectively the same:

$ knife search ubuntu

or:

$ knife search node "tags:*ubuntu* OR roles:*ubuntu* OR fqdn:*ubuntu* (etc.)"

Options

This sub-command has the following options:

-a ATTR, --attribute ATTR
The attribute (or attributes) to show.

-b ROW, --start ROW
The row at which return results will begin.

-i, --id-only
Indicates that only matching object IDs will be shown.

INDEX The name of the index to be queried: client, environment, node, role, or DATA_BAG_NAME. Default
index: node.

-l, --long
Display long output when searching nodes while using the default summary format.

-m, --medium
Display more, but not all, of a node's data when searching using the default summary format.

-o SORT, --sort SORT
The order in which search results will be sorted.

-q SEARCH_QUERY, --query SEARCH_QUERY
Use to protect search queries that start with a hyphen (-). A -q query may be specified as an
argument or an option, but not both.

-r, --run-list
Indicates that only the run-list will be shown.

-R INT, --rows INT
The number of rows to be returned.

SEARCH_QUERY
The search query used to identify a a list of items on a server. This option uses the same syntax
as the search sub-command.

Examples

To search for the IDs of all nodes running on the Amazon EC2 platform, enter:

$ knife search node 'ec2:*' -i

to return something like:

4 items found

ip-0A7CA19F.ec2.internal

ip-0A58CF8E.ec2.internal

ip-0A58E134.ec2.internal

ip-0A7CFFD5.ec2.internal

To search for the instance type (flavor) of all nodes running on the Amazon EC2 platform, enter:

$ knife search node 'ec2:*' -a ec2.instance_type

to return something like:

4 items found

ec2.instance_type: m1.large
id: ip-0A7CA19F.ec2.internal

ec2.instance_type: m1.large
id: ip-0A58CF8E.ec2.internal

ec2.instance_type: m1.large
id: ip-0A58E134.ec2.internal

ec2.instance_type: m1.large
id: ip-0A7CFFD5.ec2.internal

To search for all nodes running Ubuntu, enter:

$ knife search node 'platform:ubuntu'

To search for all nodes running CentOS in the production environment, enter:

$ knife search node 'chef_environment:production AND platform:centos'

To find a nested attribute, use a pattern similar to the following:

$ knife search node <query_to_run> -a <main_attribute>.<nested_attribute>

To build a search query to use more than one attribute, use an underscore ( _ ) to separate each
attribute. For example, the following query will search for all nodes running a specific version of Ruby:

$ knife search node "languages_ruby_version:1.9.3"

To build a search query that can find a nested attribute:

$ knife search node name:<node_name> -a kernel.machine

To test a search query that will be used in a knife ssh command:

$ knife search node "role:web AND NOT name:web03"

where the query in the previous example will search all servers that have the web role, but not on the
server named web03.

AUTHOR

       Opscode

                                                   Chef 11.8.0                                   KNIFE-SEARCH(1)