Default attribute is nil for Chef Apache2 cookbook

Question

I'm trying to provision an Ubuntu 13.04 box with Chef-solo (11.4.4), however the apache2 cookbook gives an error:

undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

 20:  package "apache2" do
 21>>   package_name node['apache']['package']
 22:  end

My guess is that the default attributes for the cookbook are not loaded, i.e. node['apache'] is nil, but I have no clue how to solve this...

case platform  
when "debian", "ubuntu"
   default['apache']['package'] = "apache2"

I know there have been some changes to Chef v11 regarding attributes and previously with Chef v10 it simply works, but I don't have enough Chef knowledge to know what to change.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Apparently, in Chef 11, cookbooks need a metadata.rb in which dependencies are specified. These dependencies are used to autoload cookbooks.

Adding depends "apache2" to the metadata.rb file solves the above problem.