Testing Hiera data on the command line

The puppet lookup command helps test data interactively. For example:

puppet lookup profile::hiera_test::backups_enabled --environment production --node jenkins-prod-03.example.com

This returns the value true.

To use the puppet lookup command effectively:

• Run the command on a Puppet Server node, or on another node that has access to a full copy of your Puppet code and configuration.
• The node you are testing against should have contacted the server at least one time as this makes the facts for that node available to the lookup command (otherwise you need to supply the facts yourself on the command line).
• Make sure the command uses the global confdir and codedir, so it has access to your live data. If you’re not running puppet lookup as root user, specify --codedir and --confdir on the command line.
• If you use PuppetDB, you can use any node’s facts in a lookup by specifying --node <NAME>. Hiera can automatically get that node’s real facts and use them to resolve data.
• If you do not use PuppetDB, or if you want to test for a set of facts that don't exist, provide facts in a YAML or JSON file and specify that file as part of the command with --facts <FILE>. To get a file full of facts, rather than creating one from scratch, run facter -p --json > facts.json on a node that is similar to the node you want to examine, copy the facts.json file to your Puppet Server node, and edit it as needed.
  • Puppet Development Kit comes with predefined fact sets for a variety of platforms. You can use those if you want to test against platforms you do not have, or if you want "typical facts" for a kind of platform.
• If you are not getting the values you expect, try re-running the command with --explain. The --explain flag makes Hiera output a full explanation of which data sources it searched and what it found in them.

Related topics: The puppet lookup command, confdir, codedir.