Fail to return facts with Puppet 5.5

[smortex]

As reported in choria-legacy/mcollective-choria#455 , after updating to Puppet 5.5, facts reporting got broken:

λ mco inventory example.com
[...]
   Facts:
      No facts known

λ mco facts puppetversion
No values found for fact puppetversion

Finished processing 8 / 8 hosts in 272.56 ms

The logging system reports a problem related to aliasing:

I, [2018-03-25T15:50:44.428484+02:00 #56352]  INFO -- : choria.rb:221:in `validrequest?' Received valid request 8613664f66325aae9f7d7bb8db8a309b from choria=romain.mcollective
I, [2018-03-25T15:50:44.429182+02:00 #56352]  INFO -- : runner.rb:216:in `agentmsg' Handling message 8613664f66325aae9f7d7bb8db8a309b for agent 'rpcutil' in collective 'mcollective' from choria=romain.mcollective@example.com: {:agent=>"rpcutil", :action=>"get_fact", :caller=>"choria=romain.mcollective", :data=>{:fact=>"puppetversion", :process_results=>true}}
E, [2018-03-25T15:50:44.445924+02:00 #56352] ERROR -- : yaml_facts.rb:35:in `rescue in block in load_facts_from_source' Failed to load yaml facts from /usr/local/etc/mcollective/generated-facts.yaml: Psych::BadAlias: Unknown alias: 1
E, [2018-03-25T15:50:44.446053+02:00 #56352] ERROR -- : base.rb:46:in `rescue in block in get_fact' Failed to load facts: RuntimeError: Got empty facts

In my generated-facts.yaml file, mcollective::server::libdir is aliased to the value of mcollective::client::libdir.

[law]

Confirmed, I suffer from this issue, and this patch works for me (Ubuntu 16.04, Puppet 5.5, etc). Making the suggested change on the host and restarting the 'mcollective' service makes all my facts magically come back. Thanks so much!

[mateusz-gozdek-sociomantic]

Cool that it is fixed here as well. However keep in mind guys, that any other modules or custom facts may break too.

This bug is fixed upstream already (puppetlabs/marionette-collective#474), but if someone needs more flexible workaround, here it is:

        file_line { 'mcollective_allow_aliases_in_yaml':
                ensure             => present,
                path               => '/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/mcollective/facts/yaml_facts.rb',
                match              => '\s*facts.merge!\(YAML.safe_load\(File.read\(file\)(|, \[\], \[\], true)\)\)',   #lint:ignore:Unrecognized escape sequence
                line               => '                facts.merge!(YAML.safe_load(File.read(file), [Symbol], [], true))',
                append_on_no_match => false,
                notify             => Service['mcollective'],
        }

[ripienaar]

soonish I'll update the fact export script to write a JSON file as well and switch to JSON :)