A collection of task oriented solutions in Puppet

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Syntax check your manifests

Challenge

We all make mistakes, the trick is to quickly find and fix them.

Solution

# if we have this (note the missing comma after mode) in our manifest

file { "/tmp/broken_resource":
    mode => 644
    owner => "root",
}

# to syntax check it we run
$ puppet --parseonly unixdaemon/manifests/init.pp

# and we get -
err: Could not parse for environment production: Syntax error at 'owner';
  expected '}' at /etc/puppet/modules/unixdaemon/manifests/init.pp:5

# check all .pp files
$ find -name '*.pp' | xargs -n 1 -t puppet --parseonly

Explanation

Finding a typo in your manifest when you’re writing it is much better than discovering it in the puppet master logs. By syntax checking your manifests as you’re working, and always before a commit, you can catch some of the more obvious errors before they escape on to the network.

This is only a basic syntax check, it won’t find misspelled properties or even incorrect resource names.