On 2013-16-09 24:05, James Kyle wrote:
I want to do a syntax check of all our managed puppet manifests in rspec. It's an easy way to generate build reports for use in a CI.My first attempt looks like this: Puppet::Face[:parser, '0.0.1'].validate('puppet/manifests/site.pp') But this throws the following error: Puppet::Error: Could not parse for environment production: Error converting value for param 'modulepath': Could not find value for $confdir at /Users/jkyle/Projects/puppet/occam/puppet/manifests/site.pp:2 from /Users/jkyle/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p247@puppet/gems/puppet-3.3.0/lib/puppet/parser/parser_support.rb:166:in `rescue in parse' Even though the same file passes if tested via puppet parser validate puppet/manifests/site.pp
The puppet 3x parser is not really suitable as a "syntax checker" only, it does things while it is parsing that are unwanted in a pure "syntax checking" use-case (e.g. some evaluation IIRC, imports, if you try to use collection you need to have store-configs turned or or it will barf, it will stop on the first found error, etc.). It is simply not designed to support the syntax-checker use-case well.
The future parser performs parsing as a separate step, then validation, and finally translation to the 3x AST for evaluation. By using only the parse and validation steps you could construct a language validator that can be used in rspec tests. It should be possible to figure out how to do this by looking at the rspec tests in spec/unit/pops/validator (i.e. what you need to set up) - it is however not perfect as some of the checking is delegated to the transformation and runtime classes. (This will be much better with a new evaluator and further improved validator - i.e. hopefully in puppet 4). Still, you would capture many syntax and semantic issues this way.
There are alternatives though, the corresponding functionality in Geppetto is available as plugins to travis and jenkins (have to check if the geppetto-jenkins plugin is generally available yet). You can also run puppet-lint as part of this setup. The Geppetto CI plugins should give you a more high quality checking than what you can (easily) achieve by using 'puppet as a library'. These are used when publishing to the forge to check quality issues BTW. One advantage with the Geppetto validator is that it also supports stylistic checks and checks for problematic expressions (like puppet-lint), something that the runtime parser does not do.
Then there are runtime issues naturally - none of the tools can capture those problems (rspec-puppet can find some).
Not being able to run the parser via Puppet Faces is the least of the problems IMO.
While I would love to get help to ensure that the Puppet runtime validator is perfect your best bet is to look at the Geppetto validator for CI if you want to do something right away.
Hope that helps. Regards - henrik -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
