Dynamic list of files managed from hiera

[Guillem Liarte]

All,

I use hiera in an straight way, for example:

---
mode: '0644'

that makes easy to do:

file { somefile:
     mode => hiera('mode')
}


So far so good. But what about more complex structures? I would liek to be able to handle hashes of data like this:

in yaml:

---
file_list:
    - file1:
      fname: 'config.conf'
      fpath: '/path/to/destination/'
      fmode: '640'
      fowner: 'sam'
      fgroup: 'admin'
  - file2:
      fname: 'parameters.xml'
      fpath: '/path/to/destination/'
      fmode:  '660'
      fowner: 'tom'
      fgroup:  'finance'


Is it possible to handle this right now? What can I do in order to get a list of items that contain attributes?  I understand taht this type of parsing happens for example when an ENC produces YAML in this way:

clasees:
   myapp:
      parameter1: 'value1'
      parameter2: 'value2'

Can I do something similar to this with puppet-hiera?

And also, is the a decent piece of documentation for hiera and hiera-puppet? there seems to be almost nothing but fragmented documentation. I am happy top read and research all this in my own but I have struggled finding documentation.


Many thanks in advance!


Guillem

[jcbollinger]

Yes.  Hiera understands general YAML values (at least YAML 1.1; I don't know about 1.2) associated with top-level scalar keys.  Complex values are presented in Puppet via the natural mapping to Puppet hashes and arrays, nested as needed.

 

What can I do in order to get a list of items that contain attributes?  I understand taht this type of parsing happens for example when an ENC produces YAML in this way:

clasees:
   myapp:
      parameter1: 'value1'
      parameter2: 'value2'

Can I do something similar to this with puppet-hiera?

Again, yes.  The only caveat here is that the top level of your data document should associate values with scalar keys.  Hiera looks up values by those top-level keys.

 

And also, is the a decent piece of documentation for hiera and hiera-puppet? there seems to be almost nothing but fragmented documentation. I am happy top read and research all this in my own but I have struggled finding documentation.

I am unaware of any comprehensive documentation for Hiera.  Perhaps that overstates the case a bit, though, as "comprehensive" suggests big and complicated, and that's not a good characterization of Hiera.

If you have not already seen these documents, then you should read them:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera  (scroll down)
https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera-puppet  (scroll down)
http://puppetlabs.com/blog/first-look-installing-and-using-hiera/

Those should be enough to get anyone up and going with Hiera, but they do, I think, miss details about some of Hiera's more advanced capabilities.  Until better documentation becomes available, this forum is a good place to pose questions.  And there's always the code, of course, which is fairly small.


John

[Ellison Marks]

You also might look at R.I.P's blog posts on the subject. They don't have info on the 3.0 behavior, of course, but they were enormously useful to me when I was first trying to understand the system.

http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/06/05/hiera_a_pluggable_hierarchical_data_store.php
http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/06/06/puppet_backend_for_hiera.php
http://www.devco.net/archives/2011/06/11/puppet_backend_for_hiera_part_2.php