As I discussed on Thursday, I am looking to re-architect the layout of my controlrepo’s rspec tests. Of course, there were yaks to shave, first. To that end, I’ve released version 0.10.0 of generate-puppetfile (rubygem, github project) with the added ability to run generate-puppetfile --create-fixtures at the top of your controlrepo and generate a .fixtures.yml that will set up symlinks for all of the modules contained in your controlrepo. This functionality is based off the existence of the file environment.conf in the current directory and it containing a modulepath stanza. All the paths in the modulepath are explored and symlink-type fixtures created for each module found. Previous functionality when run inside a module directory is still preserved, of course.

Because the project has not reached version 1.0.0 yet, I have renamed the option --fixtures to --create-fixtures. This is in preparation for a feature request for an --only-fixtures feature request.

Let’s look at how to use this new feature. Before we start, we must be at the top level of the controlrepo. Next, we need environment.conf to have a modulepath stanza. In my controlrepo, the file looks like this:

$ cat environment.conf
modulepath = dist:modules:$basemodulepath
$ tree -L 1 dist
dist
├── profile
└── role

2 directories, 0 files
$ tree -L 1 modules
modules [error opening dir]

0 directories, 0 files

We can now run generate-puppetfile to update the Puppetfile and fixtures file:

$ be generate-puppetfile -p Puppetfile -c --create-fixtures

Installing modules. This may take a few minutes.

Your Puppetfile has been generated. Copy and paste between the markers:

=======================================================================
...
<Puppetfile content>
...
=======================================================================

Generating .fixtures.yml using module name profile

Generating .fixtures.yml for a controlrepo.

(Yes, there’s a little output cleanup to be done in the next version!) When complete, we can see the top of the fixtures file has symlinks for the role and profile modules:

$ head -5 .fixtures.yml
fixtures:
  symlinks:
    role: "#{source_dir}/dist/role"
    profile: "#{source_dir}/dist/profile"
  forge_modules:

If we run rake spec_prep we can be sure that the modules are “installed” properly in the spec environment:

$ be rake spec_prep
...
<tons of output from forge module installations>
...
$ puppet module list --modulepath spec/fixtures/modules | egrep "(role|profile)"
├── rnelson0-profile (v0.1.0)
├── rnelson0-role (v0.1.0)

With this feature in place, you can now use generate-puppetfile in conjunction with spec tests at the top of your controlrepo instead of in the module directories. Enjoy!