I'll try to clarify what I'd like with my poor english ;)

Here, we manage ~50 groups of 3 hosts (1 firewall, 2 proxies). The nodes are installed by default with the same master and same IP settings.

We want to move the 2 proxies to puppet and foreman as a node classifer.
The process we found to install the servers is the following :
- create a new group
- create variables for this group (ipaddress_relay1, ipaddress_relay2, domain, ipaddress_gateway, MS domain parameters for proxy auth...)
- create the new servers
- affect classes to nodes and group
- on the puppetmaster, use puppetmasterd to compile catalog using the "install" environment
- on the nodes, apply the catalog and then, move the nodes to the "production" environment at next reboot. (It's better to reboot since we are changing ip and hostname settings)
- manage day to day nodes with foreman :)

The problem using this procedure is the second step. It's really easy to forget the creation of one variable or to misspell one.

The feature I'd like is pre-populate the list of variables to enter for a group. It can be done depending the environment or a "group template" where you can store default classes and variables for new groups.

Benjamin

would cloning an existing host group solves your problem?

Yep! It would solve this problem.

Thanks

We use a rake task for this.

An easier alternative would be nice.

Would be nice to have a more general approach to this and allow you not only to clone host groups, but any clone level of parameters "set". Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Feature #563 would also help here.