Accessing an environment in the puppet-server

[Brice Figureau]

Hi,

I'm still playing with my file_metadata implementation, and want to
provide the 'modules' special mount. This mount requires finding the
module path of a given environment in the clojure part.

I found environment registry references in the code, but I'm really
unsure it fulfills my requirements (accessing the ruby environments
specific information) or how to use it.

Any pointers I should look to?

Thanks!
--
Brice Figureau
My Blog: http://www.masterzen.fr/

[Chris Price]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Brice Figureau <brice-...@daysofwonder.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm still playing with my file_metadata implementation, and want to
provide the 'modules' special mount. This mount requires finding the
module path of a given environment in the clojure part.

I found environment registry references in the code, but I'm really
unsure it fulfills my requirements (accessing the ruby environments
specific information) or how to use it.

Any pointers I should look to?

Ewww... that's a really sticky one that I hadn't thought of yet.  For now, there is no way to get access to a setting like that directly from the clojure code, without making a call into the JRuby layer.

Medium-to-long term, our goal is going to be to eliminate dependencies on JRuby for this sort of thing, so that new service implementations can be written in pure Clojure.  This ultimately means migrating the relevant settings out of puppet.conf and into the puppetserver configuration.  So I can see a couple of different options to explore:

1. Just add whatever extra settings you need to the puppetserver config files now; the settings would end up being duplicated across the two configs for the time being, which is not something we'd want to do in an actual release, but would be the path of least resistance for an experimental branch.

or

2. Make your new service have a TK dependency on the PuppetServerConfigService, like we are currently doing for the CA:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-server/blob/master/src/clj/puppetlabs/services/ca/certificate_authority_service.clj

Then make sure the PuppetServerConfigService exposes the particular settings you're interested in from Puppet, e.g.:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-server/blob/master/src/clj/puppetlabs/services/config/puppet_server_config_core.clj#L15

I'm not even 100% sure that that would completely solve your problem, though, because in Puppet 4 with the directory environments you probably need to actually look up the environment via some ruby code and then interrogate the module path from the ruby object.  In that case you would probably need to extend the JRubyPuppet interface:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet-server/blob/master/src/java/com/puppetlabs/puppetserver/JRubyPuppet.java#L17

and provide a method for looking up the modulepath for an environment.  Plumbing that through probably wouldn't be *too* hard, but will be a very expensive operation if you don't figure out a reasonable way to cache the results so that you don't have to do it on every request.

This whole situation w/rt environments is probably something that we need to add to the list with auth.conf and do some design work around how to solve it the right way for the long-term. :(  Thanks for raising the issue, I'll start trying to put some thought into it.