Finding YAML errors in puppet


I love tabs, they’re so much easier to work with, but YAML doesn’t like them. I’m constantly adding them in accidentally, and puppet’s error message is a bit cryptic:

Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: malformed format string - %S at /etc/puppet/manifests/foo.pp:18 on node bar.example.com

This happens during a puppet run, which in my case loads up YAML files. The tricky part was that the error wasn’t at all related to the foo.pp file, it just happened to be the first time hiera was run. So where’s the real error?

$ cd /etc/puppet/hieradata/; for i in `find . -name '*.yaml'`; do echo $i; ruby -e "require 'yaml'; YAML.parse(File.open('$i'))"; done

Run this one liner on your puppetmaster, and hiera should quickly point out which files have errors, and exactly which lines (and columns) they’re on.

Happy hacking,

James


You can follow James on Mastodon for more frequent updates and other random thoughts.
You can follow James on Twitter for more frequent updates and other random thoughts.
You can support James on GitHub if you'd like to help sustain this kind of content.
You can support James on Patreon if you'd like to help sustain this kind of content.


Comments

Nothing yet.


Post a comment



(sorry but the spammers were getting too crazy!)

Thank you

Your comment has been submitted and will be published if it gets approved.

Click here to see the patch you generated.

OK