A web-app that lets you explore your hiera files.
Hiera is a tool by PuppetLabs that lets you organize configuration data in hierarchically organized files (usually in yaml format). For more information, see the Hiera documentation.
While Hiera offers a lot of flexibility, you quickly end up with your configuration data spread across dozens of yaml files. Figuring out which files and values are used in any given context can be difficult.
This is where hiera-explorer comes in. It analyzes your hiera.yaml
config file and your data files. For a given scope (e.g. values of the
relevant facts), it shows you the load order of data files, the
content of all the relevant data files and the merged data, taking
into account the hierarchy.
hiera-explorer is a JVM web application, you need a Java Runtime Environment version 1.6 or later to run it.
Download the hiera-explorer standalone jar file from the Releases section of the Github project.
To start the app, run
java -jar hiera-explorer-0.2.8-standalone.jar
hiera-explorer is written in Clojure, to build it from source you need to have Leiningen installed. To run the app directly from the source checkout, run
lein ring server
To build a standalone jar file including all the dependencies, run
lein uberjar
This jar file can be used as shown in the previous section.
All configuration is currently done via environment variables, which need to be set when the application is started. There is no config file.
The following variables can be set:
Name of the hiera config file to load. The path can be absolute or relative to the directory from which the application was started.
Defaults to resources/example/hiera.yaml (an example provided with
the source code).
It is usually enough to set only this variable.
Path of the directory where the hiera data files are located.
If this variable is not set, the directory is read from the :yaml -> :datadir entry in the hiera config file.
If a relative path is given (either in the environment variable of the hiera config file), it is interpreted relative to the location of the hiera config file.
Port for the embedded HTTP server to list on.
Defaults to 3000.
Currently only YAML files are supported as hiera data files.
Only the Priority lookup type is used for displaying the merged data, Array Merge and Hash Merge lookups are currently not represented. (See the documentation on Hiera lookup types.)
Hiera is not actually used to look up any values, so there may be differences in the lookup logic between hiera and hiera-explorer. If you come across such a case, please file a bug report!
Bug reports, pull requests and general feedback are very welcome! Please make use of Github issues or ping me on Twitter (@cdberg).
Copyright © 2014 Christian Berg
Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.