I wanted to dynamically set my run list for testing with Vagrant without editing the Vagrantfile. Since the Vagrantfile is just Ruby, and the run list is an array, I can split a string into an array and use it.

If I don’t specify the run list, it will still configure the node with my base Ubuntu configuration. Then bring up a Vagrant box with a comma separated string of items in the run list.

% CHEF_RUN_LIST="role[ubuntu],recipe[apache2]" vagrant up