How to use Hiera to assign modules to nodes in Puppet

hierapuppet

I have decided to switch from a single default nodes.pp to a Hiera back-end to manage nodes in Puppet and assign modules to nodes.

We use hostnames as such:

nyc-apache-prod-01
was-mysql-tst-01

This is our hiera.yaml and hierdata-directory structure:

# cat hiera.yaml 
:backends:
    - yaml

:hierarchy:
    - environment/tst/%{::hostname}
    - environment/tst
    - %{::osfamily}
    - common

:logger: console

:yaml:
    :datadir: '/etc/puppet/hieradata'

# find hieradata
hieradata
hieradata/RedHat.yaml
hieradata/OracleRAC.yaml
hieradata/common.yaml
hieradata/environment
hieradata/environment/dev
hieradata/environment/tst.yaml
hieradata/environment/acc
hieradata/environment/dev.yaml
hieradata/environment/acc.yaml
hieradata/environment/tst
hieradata/environment/tst/nyc-ks-tst-02.yaml
hieradata/environment/tst/nyc-ks-tst-01.yaml
hieradata/environment/prd
hieradata/environment/prd.yaml

The problem is that environments need to be set as environment=tst in the /etc/puppet/puppet.conf on each individual node. I could write a module to do this based on the hostname of the server, but I am not sure this is the best way to organize servers in seperate environments.

  • What is the best way to be able to have different Puppet modules for
    different servers?
  • And what is the best way to add specific modulesto a group of servers?
  • e.g. I have 10 Apache webservers… I would like to have all these apache-nodes, no matter if they are tst/acc/dev/prd to have the apache modules.

The thing I want to avoid is to add a list of classes in the list of classes for each individual server. This was the reason we were moving from the single node.pp to a Hiera back-end in the first place.

Best Answer

You might want to assign a role to servers, and use that to provide them with packages.

For instance; in /etc/facter/facts.d you put a file that sets a role fact. You could use that as a Hiera hierarchy level to assign modules to the servers then.

Never tried it myself, but I think that could work.. :)

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