puppetdb missing environment fact

[james.e...@fasthosts.com]

Hi,

I'm seeing something rather strange with puppetdb (1.5.2) in regards to the environment fact.

On my puppetdb host:

If I run the following query:

curl -G 'http://localhost:8080/v3/facts' --data-urlencode 'query=["=", "name", "environment"]'

I would expect to receive the environment fact for every node that I'm managing with puppet (>500).

However, that query only returns 11 nodes.  These 11 nodes are running puppet 2.7.22.

I am in the process of upgrading puppet to 3.3.2 from 2.7.22.

All of the nodes running 3.3.2 are missing the environment fact from puppetdb.  All the 2.7.22 nodes have the environment fact stored.

Can anyone think of a reason why the environment fact is missing for my 3.3.2 nodes?

J

[Luke Bigum]

'environment' is not a Fact:

laptop:~$ sudo facter -p environment

laptop:~$ 

It is a configuration parameter of Puppet. I'm not sure why older 2.7 hosts would be reporting it as a Fact to PuppetDB, unless in 2.7 all top scope variables were sent this way.

You could use a Fact to pull out what environment an Agent *would* run with using this Fact code:

#Get the configured environment out of puppet.conf

begin

    puppet_environment = ''

    File.open('/etc/puppet/puppet.conf').each do |line|

        if line =~ /^\s*environment\s*=\s*(\S+)/

            puppet_environment = $1

        end

    end

    Facter.add(:puppet_environment) do

        setcode do

            puppet_environment

        end

    end

rescue

    Facter.warn("puppet_environment.rb failed: #{$!}")

end

[james.e...@fasthosts.com]

Thanks Luke. 

I just found a bug report describing that this behaviour has changed in 3.x http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/17692

For me, being able to determine the agent environment is very useful.

We use git for the Puppet manifests and each branch is an environment.

So we'll create new branches to test and deploy new features.

Then when it's ready to go live to all nodes, we'll merge that branch back into master and remove the feature branch.

I rely on being able to query puppetdb or puppet-dashboard to find out which nodes are using environment X, so I can safely remove a branch once there are no nodes using it.

We also manage Puppet with Puppet and set the environment in puppet.conf based on the current environment.  This does still work as the environment is available in the manifests.

I also found the following code (at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/AM1o4Khloto) for turning environment into a fact.

Including it here in case it's useful to others.

require 'puppet'

Facter.add('environment') do
  setcode do
    Puppet[:environment]
  end
end

J