Hello,
I work for the CHTC (Center for High Throughput Computing) at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. We utilize puppet for most of our
configuration management. Currently we have a web application that
performs the tasks of user account management. When a new user is
registered with the application, the application does some very limited
parsing of a puppet manifest that has resources like this one:
@useraccount { 'johndoe':
uid => 'XXXXX',
fullname => 'John Doe',
email => 'john...@wisc.edu',
home => '/home/johndoe',
password => 'SOMEHASH',
ensure => 'present',
group => 'mathdepartment',
tag => 'cluster-users'
}
If a resource doesn't exist for the new users, the application edits the
file and creates the resource, populating the fields with the proper
values. The code that does this is very limited. I would like it to do
things like:
- Change fields that the user web application governs; Leave fields alone
that the web application is not aware of
- For fields that are arrays or hashes, allow for appending values to the
array or hash, rather than replacing it
- Do resource dependency checking; Does the group resource
'mathdepartment' exist? Will it be 'present'? Will the manifest that the
'mathdepartment' group resource is in be read and the class declared?
- Check to see if there are any puppet errors in the code at all. If a
client pulls the configuration for the manager, will it receive an error?
I would think the best way to accomplish these goals would be to use an
existing API or library that can actually parse puppet code, save it into
data structures, and run functions of the puppet engine on said data
structures. Basically, the functions of the parser the puppet engine
itself uses. Is it possible to use the puppet code/engine in such a way?
Even better would be if it could take puppet data structures and write
them into a puppet manifest.
Google reveals that there are various third party open source projects that
do something similar, written in various languages. If one of these works
well for you, I would like to hear which one and why you like it. However,
it would be advantageous for me to use the actual puppet engine since it
will keep pace with updates to puppet.
I'd appreciate any help or advice you can give.
Cheers,
Aaron Moate
CHTC Infrastructure Team
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