Puppet users - Nov 2010 - Documenting an infrastructure with Puppet

Hello All, 

I''ve been thinking recently about how one could use Puppet to aid in
the process of documenting infrastructure for other administrators, managers and
so forth.

Puppetdoc gets me somewhat close, since I can add content above my class
definitions and have that content associated with nodes. It seems to me though
that Puppetdoc''s strength is in creating the relationships between
classes and nodes, not in the documenting of what occurs to a system.

Would it seem feasible to anyone if in the future puppetdoc would additionally
parse resources within a class and create some human-readable documentation from
them?

For example, let''s suppose I have a class which has a file resource.

# This is the foo-file class that provides a file. 
class foo-file {
   file { ''/etc/foo-file'': ensure => present, }
}

Puppetdoc will currently (if I understand its capabilities right) associate the
commented line with the class when producing RDoc, text or whatever output.

What I''m envisioning is for it to also look at the file resource and
output something similar to "The foo-file class ensures a file named
/etc/foo-file is present on the system". This could mean that simply by
writing Puppet manifests, puppetdoc would produce documentation describing
exactly what a class would implement on your machine.


Does this seem useful to anyone else but me? If we can get a discussion going
about this and there''s interested, I''d be happy to write-up
the feature request with our consensus.

Thanks for reading, --Ryan


 

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