knife vault - TypeError: no implicit conversion of String into Array

[4-20ma]

Firstly, chef-vault is a great tool and works better than my previous method using chef-sugar (another great tool) and encrypted data bag secrets. Thanks for creating it.

I ran into the following error when attempting to create a new vault from the command line (using manage.chef.io). Strangely, I had been able to previously create a vault and successfully edit this vault.

$ knife vault create secrets password
ERROR: TypeError: no implicit conversion of String into Array

Versions

$ ruby --version
ruby 2.3.1p112 (2016-04-26 revision 54768) [x86_64-darwin15]

$ knife --version
Chef: 12.9.41

$ gem list chef-vault

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

chef-vault (2.9.0)
chef-vault-testfixtures (0.5.2)

Contents of configuration ~/.chef/config.rb

...
knife[:vault_mode] = 'client'
knife[:vault_admins] = '4-20ma'
...

I finally figured out that knife[:vault_admins] requires an array--not a string. I had been able to create the vault before I added the vault admins to my config and it is not used during a vault edit.

SOLVED: Contents of configuration ~/.chef/config.rb

...
knife[:vault_mode] = 'client'
knife[:vault_admins] = ['4-20ma']
...

This issue has been created partly to document the issue/resolution for others as well as request a change. Is it possible to either create a better warning for this, be more explicit in the documentation, or better yet, accept a string and convert it to an array on-the-fly? If you'd accept a PR for converting on the fly, I'll dig into the code and submit a PR.

[thommay]

Hi, sorry - I missed this issue. Yes, we'd totally accept a PR to convert a string into an Array in that case (or a PR to just make the warning useful)

[dheerajd-msys]

Yes @thommay It would be better to add a warning rather than converting a string to an Array. Because converting the string to array would lead to handle several scenarios of string inputs and that will add up complexity. We would be coming with a PR for user warnings.

Thanks