basho/riak-chef-cookbook — pull request #31 by nathanaschbacher (2012-06-06 19:59:58+00:00)
Title: Made the Erlang node name, http, https, and pb_ip's use real node IP addresses and hostname.

This is necessary for the node to do anything useful by default in a typical chef environment (ie, any actual cluster).

If for some reason you wanted to have those things set as riak@127.0.0.1 and 127.0.0.1 then you could easily do that by masking Role overrides onto the Recipe defaults.

This makes a lot more sense than doing it the other way around because Roles can't introspect Node metadata dynamically, but Recipes can. The real IP and hostname are dynamic per Node. 127.0.0.1 is a statically known value, likeswise for "riak" as an erlang name.