Canary tests

This minimal module and rspec is a set of canary tests for rspec-hiera-puppet.

If rspec-hiera-puppet works, then the tests in this module should pass:

Use cases

Dynamic hiera configuration

In Puppet versions before 3.0, the path to Hiera's config file, hiera.yaml, is hard-coded.

If you're using dynamic Puppet environments with git branches with Puppet 2.7, then adding rspec-hiera tests is a challenge. rspec-hiera-puppet enables you to easily load hiera.yaml content from an arbitrary file, such as a file within your git repo.

The rspec-hiera-puppet-canary module includes an example of loading hiera.yaml from a fixture in spec/spec_helper.rb. Rspec unit tests in spec/classes/example_spec.rb show how to assert whether the hiera config is correctly loaded.

rspec-hiera-puppet does a good job of loading the hiera config, and we use it at my day job for exactly this use case.

Stubbing hiera data

rspec-hiera-puppet is supposed to enable a test author to stub hiera data in unit tests by writing let(:hiera_data) { {key => value} }. This doesn't work at the moment and is the main reason for the rspec-hiera-puppet-canary module.

Caveats

The canary tests indicate incompatibilities in the code between rspec-hiera-puppet and its dependencies.

For example, rspec-hiera-puppet currently depends on code from hiera-puppet as well as puppet 3. However, The angry guide to Puppet 3 says:

...the hiera-puppet backend has been deprecated and is no longer necessary. In fact, having this around might make the world blow up. The relevant functions have also been moved into core Puppet, so you should not have this installed.

From the official PuppetLabs hiera-puppet repo:

Hiera-puppet is in end-of-life

As of the release of Puppet 3.0.0, hiera-puppet has been incorporated into the puppet codebase. The standalone hiera-puppet is only needed for releases of Puppet prior to 3.0.0, which are all in bug-fix only mode. The 1.x branch is for those older versions of puppet and is only open for urgent bug-fixes. However, do not submit fixes against this repository.

Local testing

Setup

First, ensure your system has bundler and rake, then assign values to environment variables to use the current versions of puppet and rspec-hiera-puppet along with their dependencies:

export RSPEC_HIERA_PUPPET_VERSION='1.0.0'
export PUPPET_VERSION='3.0.2'
bundle update

The above commands should produce output similar to:

Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/.........
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..
Using rake (10.0.3) 
Using diff-lcs (1.1.3) 
Using facter (1.6.17) 
Using hiera (1.0.0) 
Using hiera-puppet (1.0.0) 
Using metaclass (0.0.1) 
Using mocha (0.13.2) 
Using puppet (3.0.2) 
Using rspec-core (2.12.2) 
Using rspec-expectations (2.12.1) 
Using rspec-mocks (2.12.2) 
Using rspec (2.12.0) 
Using rspec-puppet (0.1.6) 
Using puppetlabs_spec_helper (0.4.0) 
Using rspec-hiera-puppet (1.0.0) 
Using bundler (1.2.3) 
Your bundle is updated! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

Run the tests locally

Run the tests with:

rake spec