delete vagrant vm's chef client and node from chef server on destroy

middleware.rb

class OnDestroyMiddleware
  def initialize(app, env)
    @app = app
  end
    
  def call(env)
    env["config"].vm.provisioners.each do |provisioner|
      env.ui.info "Attempting to remove client #{provisioner.config.node_name}"
      `knife client show #{provisioner.config.node_name}`
      if $?.to_i == 0
        env.ui.info "Removing client #{provisioner.config.node_name}"
        `knife client delete #{provisioner.config.node_name} -y`
      end
      env.ui.info "Attempting to remove node #{provisioner.config.node_name}"
      `knife node show #{provisioner.config.node_name}`
      if $?.to_i == 0
        env.ui.info "Removing node #{provisioner.config.node_name}"
        `knife node delete #{provisioner.config.node_name} -y`
      end
    end
    @app.call(env)
  end
end

Vagrant::Action[:destroy].use(OnDestroyMiddleware)

I put this in my Vagrantfile at the top, and it works like a charm! The one catch is that knife needs to be correctly setup; usually knife is setup to run in your chef-repo, but you'll probably be running vagrant destroy in a separate folder (like your rails app)... so just be aware and setup knife to read from ~/.chef/knife.rb

This is great man. Thanks for tossing it out there!

Actually, Vagrant already provides a cleanup method in the provisioners base class that gets called on vm destroy. It just ins't filled in for most Provisioners. See http://frank.be/articles/2011/12/16/vagrant-and-chef-auto-deregister-on-vm-destroy/ for quick and dirty example

WHOA. world rocked. Had totally forgotten this once i actually started using the chef_client provisioner

thanks guys

@franklouwers; perfect! thanks

I adapted both cited works here and came to this: https://gist.github.com/4223941