At puppetconf 2014, Tomas Doran pointed out that if you aren’t checking your puppet manifests for strict variables, you are figurativly punching a puppy in the face. Noone wants that, nor do they want to debug why your module is trying to use an invalid variable. You should always enable checks for strict variables. Here’s why:

For example, suppose you are using the fact $::operatingsystemmajrelease. This fact will return ‘6’ on a Cent 6.5 machine, ‘7’ on a Cent 7 machine. However this fact is only available in newer version of facter (>=1.8).

puppet apply -e 'notice($::operatingsystemmajrelease)'

If you attempt to run this on a machine that doesn’t have a major release (e.g. Os X), or on a machine with facter <=1.8; facter will silently return a null value.

If you are wise, you will validate all inputs like so:

if $operatingsystemmajrelease {
    notice("Major OS reporting ${::operatingsystemmajrelase}")
 }
else {
    fail('Why you no have operating system with major release?')
}

While this validation is good, you should instead catch it at the source with strict variables.

Testing

To test that your variables are strict, export the following variable.

$ export STRICT_VARIABLES=yes

Then run your rake tests

$ rake spec

You are running rake tests aren’t you?
If you aren’t yet see this blog.

puppetlabs nextgeneration of testing

There are some example tests you can copy, located in spec/classes/*.rb spuder/gitlab

Custom Facts

In the above example, we got an empty variable by using a fact only available on newer versions of facter. Another example when empty variables can bite you in the butt is when using custom facts.

Here I have a custom fact which returns $::operatingsystem in lower case. (I’ve called the fact $::operatingsystem_lowercase )

$ cat ./lib/facter/operatingsystem_lowercase.rb
Facter.add("operatingsystem_lowercase") do
  setcode do
        Facter.value('operatingsystem').downcase
  end
end

If I run rake tests, and check for strict variables, it throws an error about an undefined variable.

  13) gitlab when $puppet_manage_packages is false 
 Failure/Error: it { should_not contain_class('gitlab::packages') }
 Puppet::Error:
   Undefined variable "::operatingsystem_lowercase"; Undefined variable "operatingsystem_lowercase" at /vagrant/spec/fixtures/modules/gitlab/manifests/install.pp:114 on node gitlab-test
 # ./spec/classes/gitlab_spec.rb:227

You will likely always get errors when using custom facts, even if you provide the custom fact as part of the rspec test.

Solution

If you have errors, you can fix them by wrapping the fact lookup with the function getvar(). This function is only available if you have the puppetlabs/puppetlabs_stdlib module installed. (If you add it, make sure to add the dependency to your metadata.json file.)

Example,

 getvar( $::operatingsystemmajrelease )

Make sure you aren’t doing text expansion on the fact, or you will still get errors durring your rake spec test

#Bad, this won't work
getvar( "${::operatingsystemmajrelease}")

getvar()

Unfortunately as of the time of this writing, the getvar function is awaiting this pull request

Until that merge request is accepted, you will need to manually edit your .fixtures.yaml file to point to a fork with the fix.

There was a bug in puppetlabs_stdlib which would cause strict variable checking to fail in some circomstances. The bug has been fixed and is currently pending release. ( Hopefully it will be present in stdlib 1.0.1 )

If you have an older version of stdlib that doesn’t have the fix yet, you will need to patch your module, or temporarially modify your .fixtures.yaml file to point to a fork that has the fix.

For Example, my .fixtures.yaml

Before:

fixtures:
  repositories:
    stdlib: git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib.git
  symlinks:
    gitlab: "#{source_dir}"

After: (note that we are using the bobtfish fork)

fixtures:
  repositories:
    stdlib: git://github.com/bobtfish/puppetlabs-stdlib
    ref: "fix_strict_variables"
  symlinks:
    gitlab: "#{source_dir}"

Then to run your tests, run the following

 $ rake spec_prep
 $ rake spec

Travis

Lastly, if you have a .travis file, add tests for strict variables by exporting the environment variable. This feature is only available on versions of puppet ~3.6.x

Exmaple .travis.yaml file

env:
  - PUPPET_VERSION=3.1.0 FACTER_VERSION=1.7.6
  - PUPPET_VERSION=3.4.0 FACTER_VERSION=2.0.2
  - PUPPET_VERSION=3.6.0 FACTER_VERSION=2.1.0
  - PUPPET_VERSION=3.6.0 FACTER_VERSION=2.1.0 STRICT_VARIABLES=yes

You now can be sure that your modules won’t fail silently if a fact returns null.