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Chris Tonkinson
Asked: 2014-03-01 03:35:20 +0800 CST

How to define multiple /etc/hosts entries with Puppet ENC?

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I'm writing an External Node Classifier for my Puppet infrastructure, and I have the need to manipulate the /etc/hosts file on each node. The following (due to the duplicate key) is invalid YAML:

---
  host:
    name: www1.example.com
    host_aliases: www1
    ip: 1.2.3.4
  host:
    name: www2.example.com
    host_aliases: www2
    ip: 1.2.3.5

I see this related answer, which has the following code:

host {
  # Public IPs - eth0
  'front-01': ip => '192.168.1.103';
  'front-02': ip => '192.168.1.106';

  # Private IPs - eth1
  'priv0-0': ip => '192.169.40.201';
  'priv0-1': ip => '192.169.40.202';
  'priv1-0': ip => '192.169.40.207';
  'priv1-1': ip => '192.169.40.208';

  # Virtual IPs - eth0:1
  'vip-01': ip => '192.169.50.202';
  'vip-02': ip => '192.169.50.205';
}

However,

  1. It's not immediately obvious to me what's actually going on here.
  2. I can't find documentation for this anywhere.
  3. Because these (don't look like) class parameters - and because of #1 and #2 above - it's also not obvious to me how I could translate this into YAML.

A naive guess would be:

'host':
  'www1':
    'ip': 1.2.3.4
  'www2':
    'ip': 1.2.3.5

But because of #2 above, I'm not comfortable moving forward with this in production. My question then:

Where can I find documentation on using the host class this way?

Or failing that

How else can I manage multiple /etc/hosts entries with an ENC?

NB: These definitions are being used to quickly configure transient multi-node clusters on a cloud services API for development and testing purposes, so while I'm not wholly unwilling to explore a DNS-based (or other alternative) solution, managing /etc/hosts in this way (if possible) is a much simpler solution with far fewer moving parts.

SOLUTION: Posted here for reference is my final code:

class my_hosts(
  $hosts = {
    'localhost.localdomain' => {
      'ensure'       => 'present',
      'name'         => 'localhost.localdomain',
      'host_aliases' => 'localhost',
      'ip'           => '127.0.0.1',
    },
  },
  ) {

  create_resources host, $hosts

}

And then my ENC YAML looks like this:

classes:
  my_hosts:
    hosts:
      www1.example.com:
        ensure: present
        name: www1.example.com
        host_aliases: www1
        ip: 10.0.0.101
      www2.example.com:
        ensure: present
        name: www2.example.com
        host_aliases: www2
        ip: 10.0.0.102
puppet

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    ad 1 & 2:

    host {
  'front-01': ip => '192.168.1.103';
  'front-02': ip => '192.168.1.106';
}

    is just a shortened notation for

    host { 'front-01':
  ip => '192.168.1.103',
}
host { 'front-02':
  ip => '192.168.1.106',
}

    ad 3:

    When you have a YAML data entry like this:

    custom_hosts:
  www1:
    ip: 1.2.3.4
  www2:
    ip: 1.2.3.5
    comment: other attributes work also
  www3:
    name: testserver
    ip: 1.2.3.6

    you can load it into a puppet hash and then create resources from it

    $custom_hosts = hiera('custom_hosts',{})
create_resources(host, $custom_hosts)

    This yields the same result as:

    host { 'www1':
  ip => '1.2.3.4',
}
host { 'www2':
  ip      => '1.2.3.5',
  comment => 'other attributes work also',
}
host { 'www3':
  name => 'testserver',
  ip   => '1.2.3.6',
}

    So these lines should be written to /etc/hosts:

    1.2.3.4 www1
1.2.3.5 www2 # other attributes work also
1.2.3.6 testserver
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