cramerdev/capistrano-chef — pull request #14 by matthewsmart (2012-12-06 21:16:31+00:00)
Title: Don't query chef when roles are being overridden by HOSTS environment variable

When HOSTS environment variable is specified, hosts gets overridden, so querying chef can be a waste of time.

Also, if the project is being deployed from a machine without knife configured. My use case is a chef client wants to clone to /tmp/project and deploy to itself with HOSTS=127.0.0.1. This allows deployment to not break due to knife not being configured.