Puppet class browser¶

There are links labeled "Documentation" on the settings/puppet classes page, which will direct your browser to the html documentation for a particular puppet module.

The documentation is generated by a rake task that uses the puppetdoc utility and may need some customization to work at a particular site.

Configuration¶

Document root¶

There is an optional entry in the config/settings.yaml which overrides the location of the generated HTML pages. The default value is RAILS_ROOT/public which relies upon the rails built-in web server.

:document_root: /var/www

The documentation will be written into document_root/puppet/rdoc and this location must be in an area that is served by a web server. Any location that is served by apache or webrick/mongrel will do, and foreman's public directory is the default.

manifest cleanup¶

The puppetdoc utility is sensitive to the layout of the manifests and modules directories. In particular, it cannot handle circular or broken symlinks. If you have problems running puppetdoc then move extras/rdoc/rdoc_prepare_script.rb to scripts/rdoc_prepare_script.rb and then edit it to suit your site. Most sites will not require a scripts/rdoc_prepare_script.rb file.

Generating the documentation.¶

Simple case¶

This is performed by running

rake puppet:rdoc:generate

Complex case¶

If the puppetdoc utility fails to process your manifests then you will have to sanitize your puppet modules directory. The rake puppet:rdoc:generate task will check for the existence of scripts/rdoc_prepare_script.rb, and runs this before the the puppetdoc command is executed. This script is expected to copy the source files for your modules to another location, fix any issues and then terminate, passing back the location of the copied directory tree.

A fairly complex example is provided in extras/rdoc/rdoc_prepare_script.rb.

The final command to generate the documentation is then the same as for the simple case

rake puppet:rdoc:generate

Automation¶

This rake task is suitable for placing in a cron job and can be added with

sudo cron -e -u root

and a line added like this

22 2 * * * (cd /var/rails/foreman; rake puppet:rdoc:generate)

Note that this command assumes that root has write permissions to /var/rails/foreman/public/puppet/rdoc or wherever you have set document_root to in config/settings.yml

Running the command as a non root user¶

You may experience some problems when running this command, (or other puppet commands,) as a non root user as puppet will change its default values for several key parameters to a location in the user's home directory.

If you run

puppet --genconfig | egrep $USER

you will see what I mean.

Running

ln -s /etc/puppet/puppet.conf ~/.puppet/puppet.conf

helps somewhat but beware of this feature