Installing and configuring Hiera

From Puppet 3.x, Hiera has been officially integrated, and it is installed as a dependency when we install Puppet.

With Puppet 2.x, we need to install it separately, on the node where the Puppet Master resides—we need both the hiera and hiera-puppet packages, either via the OS native packaging system or via gem.

Note

gem is a package manager for Ruby, the language used to implement Puppet. It offers a unified format for self-contained packages commonly called gems. It's commonly used to install Puppet plugins. We'll see it multiple times throughout the book.

Hiera is not needed by the clients, unless they operate in a Masterless setup as Hiera is only used in the variables lookup during catalog compilation.

Its configuration file is hiera.yaml, its paths depends on how it is invoked:

• When invoked from Puppet, the default path will be /etc/puppetlabs/code/hiera.yaml (/etc/puppet/hiera.yaml and /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml for Puppet Enterprise); this can be...