This eventually required a support ticket to figure out, so I’m documenting it here in case it’s useful to others.
The problem: You have a puppet function you find useful. At this point custom functions are really easy to create and distribute via modules so there’s really no reason not to be using them. However, you want to use the result of a function in your templates.
A real-world example of this is sharing authentication information. (For example, crypted password hashes. Plain text, as always, would be evil no matter where it was living.) You really have 3 choices:
- Coding it right into your puppet code and checking that into your version control system
- Not distributing that information with puppet
- Using puppet to distribute the information, but store it outside of your puppet modules somehow.
We chose the third way, and store this kind of information in YAML files outside the puppet modules tree. Anyway. So we want to access this info inside a template.
Assume you have a function called ‘get_extdata’. You normally call from your ‘.pp’ manifests with something like
$data = get_extdata('mymodule', 'path:to:data')
You can make a call like that from your template by doing this wonderful fragment of magic-wand-waving to get this function accessible:
In mytemplate.erb:
<% Puppet::Parser::Functions.autoloader.loadall %>
Now you can use the 'scope' variable to get at your function.
This is the equivalent of the call get_extdata('mymodule', 'path:to:data'):
<%= scope.function_get_extdata('mymodule', 'path:to:data') %>
This works like a charm, and means you don’t have to create a bunch of variables that you don’t really need before you load the template.
So if you were creating an .htpasswd style file with puppet, you could do
In your init.pp:
$users = ['steve', 'paul', 'stu']
htpasswd.erb:
<% Puppet::Parser::Functions.autoloader.loadall %>
<% users.each do |user| -%>
<%= user %>:<%= scope.function_get_extdata('authmodule', user) %>
<% end -%>