Allow validation of control repos

[bittner]

The tools included with pdk (puppet-lint, rubocop, etc. as listed in the table on top of the README) are obviously meant to be run via pdk.

Their executables are all located in /opt/puppetlabs/pdk/share/cache/ruby/2.1.0/bin/, not in /opt/puppetlabs/bin/, which does not make them accessible by default from the command line.

There are two shortcomings to this:

1. Some people may like to simply run puppet-lint and other commands directly. The only sane way (from a sysadmin point of view) to fix this is by installing (the Debian package) puppet-lint. This may, however, install a different version of the linter, potentially leading to different validation results.
2. puppet-lint normally also validates a control repository, not only a module. We simply run puppet-lint . in the repository root, usually. Now, pdk validate does not like this idea as you can see below.

$ pdk validate
pdk (FATAL): This command must be run from inside a module (no metadata.json found)

A solution to 1.) would be to make puppet-lint directly accessible by placing it in /opt/puppetlabs/bin/ (or so).

As for 2.) I'm not sure how you guys want us to validate control repositories using the pdk command. I would like to for sure.

[DavidS]

Control-repo workflows are currently not implemented. A trivial extension would be for i in modules/*; do pushd $i; pdk validate; popd; done. Admittedly that is not very convenient.

[bittner]

Do you plan to allow a simple way of just calling puppet-lint, w/o metadata magic?

[alvagante]

FYI, on https://github.com/example42/psick we manage to run current pdk on the whole control repo, we have add to adda local metadata.json, (and there's also a control-repo level rspec tests layout)

[TJM]

I agree that it needs to be possible to run puppet-lint and puppet parser validate outside of a "module" directory. I would even be willing to try pdk bundle exec puppet-lint, but even the "escape hatch" validates the metadata.json.

[DavidS]

That's not a deliberate restriction. I've created https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PDK-544 for removing the metadata.json requirement for pdk bundle. Please subscribe there for updates.

[TJM]

OK, so upon further effort, and based on the note from @alvagante above, I created a bogus control_repo module with pdk new module control_repo then copied the resulting files into the control-repo. I was then able to run pdk validate (pdk validate puppet) ... which also set it up so that I can use pdk bundle exec puppet-lint if I so desire. I think the bare minimum is the metadata.json (which can probably be {}) and a Gemfile, which I just copied from the new bogus module. The Gemfile I copied was quite long, but it seemed to work and only drew on modules that were "staged" in PDK, so I didn't need Internet access (corporate firewall/proxy causing problems for us on that one). Hope this helps someone! :)

[bittner]

@TJM Thanks for the hint! Most of the magic for getting this running seems to be in the Gemfile. .rubocop.yml and .gitignore is also helpful.

In any case, there should better be a pdk new command that prepares all this, including the Puppetfile, the hieradata, site/profile, site/role folders and the manifests/site.pp file. Probably in a separate issue.

[bittner]

Closing this issue in favor of #333.