Hiera changes aren't picked up

[mtsinc1]

This is a puzzler. I use hiera definitions for my locations and vhosts, but when I update the nginx.yml file that houses them, the puppet agent doesn't pick them up. Restarting the puppetmaster doesn't help.

I know hiera and puppet know that they're there, because queries from command-line hiera and "puppet -e" show the changes, but the agent doesn't see them as changes, and therefore doesn't update the nginx configurations.

I think rebooting the entire machine fixed this the last time I ran into this, but that's a bit extreme. Any suggestions?

[mtsinc1]

Solved it.

Tried: removing the nginx rpm and running agent. Agent didn't re-install it (did nothing). Unsual.

Tried: manually declaring "package" directive" for the nginx rpm. Same results. Odd.

Tried: changing unrelated (non-nginx) part of the manifest. Still nothing. WHAT?

Found a useful diagnostic to test the manifest on the puppetmaster server without using the puppetmaster:

puppet apply /path/to/site.pp

Bingo. Returned a list of lint that I'd never seen before. Fixed the lint and puppet apply worked.

Now tried external machine. Still nothing, but a bulb began to glow dimly. I'd recently switched to multi-environment setup.

The puppetmaster is running CentOS 6, and the /etc/puppet structure has the following arrangement out of the box:

/etc
  /puppet
    /environments
       example_env
       production
   /manifests
   /modules

My original setup had all my manifests in /etc/puppet/manifests. Environments are disabled in Puppet 3.7 under CentOS 6 and that's where manifests are found by default. When I activated environments, the default environment became "production", but there was nothing under /etc/puppet/environments/production". Nothing found, nothing applied. And no errors reported.

Solution: Added an /etc/puppet/environments/production/environment.conf file indicating that the manifests were in /etc/puppet/manifests. Puppet works and applied the nginx hiera mods.

Problem resolved, not a puppet-nginx problem.