hiera.md

Hiera

Under normal circumstances, only a profile module would be consuming Hiera data directly using the lookup() function, and its suggested by Puppet that most of these fall back to automatic data binding parameters rather then using the function directly.

In this case it makes more sense to use the excellent Onceover tool to perform end-to-end testing of your Hiera data, puppet control repository and roles/profile modules.

That said, there may be occasions where you need to mock hiera data:

• You have implemented Roles and Profiles as a namespace inside a team module (for multi-tenanting)
• You have a module that performs lookup() lookups directly
• You intend to drive your module by adding data to hiera and including a class to make something happen
• Your class fails to compile due to missing hiera data
• You have a separate git repository for your profile module and want to be able to test it

Alternative method

In most cases it may be easiest to directly inject strings in lieu of setting up a fake hiera:

RSpec Tests

let :params do
  {
    :data_from_hiera => "faked by",
    :more_data       => "hardcoding inline",
  }
end

Acceptance tests

class { "foo":
  data_from_hiera => "faked by",
  more_data       => "hardcoding inline",
}

Note that you would need to duplicate your hard-coded mock data between the rspec tests and any acceptance tests.

In the more complex cases it may instead be desirable to mock the hiera data in order to enable Puppet's regular lookup systems to work.

Mocking Hiera (RSpec tests)

PDQTest fully delegates RSpec tests to PDK, so see RSpec docs for how to do this.

Mocking hiera (Acceptance tests)

PDQTest supports full mocking of Hiera acceptance tests and support for this is enabled automatically when pdqtest init is run.

A basic one-level hierachy is created for you:

• Hiera configuration file at spec/fixtures/hiera.yaml
• Single hiera data file at spec/fixtures/hieradata/test.yaml

Any required hiera data can be added to test.yaml and will immediately show up when lookups are made.