Why is the environment setting limited to alphanumeric characters only?

[Matthew Burgess]

Hi,

Our infrastructure design has the environment that a server lives in embedded in its FQDN:

hostname.seccomp-environment.local

Where seccomp is the 'security compartment' (i.e. the kind of data it houses) and env is the environment name.

I set my puppet.conf up so that 'environment = sc-env1' and got the following error back from the master:

Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: The environment must be purely alphanumeric, not 'sc-env1'

I can kind of understand there being some limitations around allowed characters (e.g. $, #, %), but I'd have thought that a hyphen would be a) pretty safe and b) quite a common use case.  Reading the fine manual (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/environment.html#naming-environments) that actually mentions that underscores are allowed too; It's a shame the error message doesn't allude to that (see PUP-1395).  So, for the time being I'll translate our hyphens to underscores to workaround the limitation. 

Does anyone know why this restriction exists, and if there are any plans to relax the restrictions?

Kind Regards,

Matt.

[Jason Antman]

Matt,

I don't remember the technical details on why it exists, but it does. No, there aren't any plans to relax it that I'm aware of...

Yeah, we use git branches as environments, and we essentially do 's/[^A-Za-z0-9_]/_/g' on the branch names to get environment names.

-Jason

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