converting node inheritance to hiera

Question

I'm working on moving over a node inheritance tree to hiera. Presently working on the hierarchy. Prior to hiera, my nodes had a hierarchy as such

base
  pre-prod
    qa
      nodes
    staging
      nodes
    development
      nodes
  prod
    nodes

Now I'm trying to get the same tier with hiera. Starting out I have this

:hierarchy:
  - base
  - "%{environment}"
  - "%{clientcert}"

but I need another level to capture pre-prod and prod. My thought would be to add an entry to puppet.conf, something like

[agent]
realm = pre-prod

then

:hierarchy:
  - base
  - "%{realm}"
  - "%{environment}"
  - "%{clientcert}"

A couple of questions

Are you allowed to place arbitrary properties into puppet.conf?
Will hiera see the realm property?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 30 '13 at 02:59

You could do that on the client side, with a custom fact instead of a puppet.conf setting. However, I'd say do it on the server side, in the Hiera data. The trick that I use for something similar is as follows:

Set something in the Hiera data at the clientcert level, for each server. In your case:
```
realm: "pre-prod"
```
Grab that variable into global scope via Hiera in site.pp, before your hiera_include:
```
$realm = hiera(realm)

hiera_include(classes)
```
The variable's been fetched from the clientcert.yaml file, and will now be used in the lookups that occur from your hiera_include, pulling from pre-prod.yaml based on the "%{realm}" config in your hierarchy.

Very nice looking, I'll give it a spin tomorrow! – quickshiftin Oct 30 '13 at 05:23 — quickshiftin, Oct 30 '13 at 05:23

converting node inheritance to hiera

1 Answers1