Custom categories with Puppet data in modules

In the old way of doing things, we would have a hierarchy in our hiera.yaml that looked something like this:

:hierarchy:
  - defaults
  - %{clientcert}
  - %{environment}
  - global

In the new way the hierarchy has been renamed categories, and each level of it is a category.

We can define category precedence in the system wide hiera.yaml, the module specific hiera.yaml, and the binder_config.yaml

The following binder_config.yaml will effectively insert the species category into the category listing:

---
version: 1
layers:
  [{name: site, include: 'confdir-hiera:/'},
   {name: modules, include: ['module-hiera:/*/', 'module:/*::default'] }
  ]
categories:
  [['node', '${fqdn}'],
   ['environment', '${environment}'],
   ['species', '${species}'],
   ['osfamily', '${osfamily}'],
   ['common', 'true']
  ]

This means we can use the species category if one is defined in a module. An example hiera.yaml from such a module is:

---
version: 2
hierarchy:
  [['osfamily', '$osfamily', 'data/osfamily/$osfamily'],
   ['species', '$species', 'data/species/$species'],
   ['environment', '$environment', 'data/env/$environment'],
   ['common', 'true', 'data/common']
  ]

Which means when we run Puppet...

root@hiera-2:/etc/puppet# FACTER_species='human' puppet apply modules/startrek/tests/init.pp 
Notice: Compiled catalog for hiera-2.green.gah in environment production in 1.07 seconds
Notice: janeway commands the voyager
Notice: /Stage[main]/Startrek/Notify[janeway commands the voyager]/message: defined 'message' as 'janeway commands the voyager'
Notice: janeway is always wary of the section 31
Notice: /Stage[main]/Startrek/Notify[janeway is always wary of the section 31]/message: defined 'message' as 'janeway is always wary of the section 31'
Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.11 seconds

You can see full example code in the startrek module.

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