Puppet users - May 2013 - High-level design question concerning Hiera with Puppet

Hello,

I have been reading for a while now about the uses of Hiera and separating 
data from configuration. I am planning on migrating my existing Puppet code 
into a Hiera structured project. I am facing a dilemma dealing with 
different versions of data.

Right now I am configuring a web application that spans across a few 
machines. I am deploying these machines with environment names, and in my 
Puppetmaster conf file, I have a dynamic modules/manifests lookup based on 
the environment name (e.g. manifests = 
$confdir/environments/$environment/manifests/site.pp).

If I have two or three different versions of the same application, how can 
I use hiera to switch between data without switching between environments? 
... That is, how can I select different data for the same environment?

I am not sure how to approach this and would like to hear any good ideas.

Thanks,
Reginald

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Not quite sure how you''re using environments but here''s what
we do...
- Environments are configured in puppet.conf and we select the environment 
at runtime: puppet -t --environment my_env
- Each environment is a complete copy of our git source tree, including 
hiera
- We pipeline our release process using branches in git, merging the code 
from branch to branch & pulling it into an environment-per-pipeline-stage
- But hiera does not implicitly know about environments the way puppet.conf 
knows about them so we do the following

# Hiera data directory contains a symlink-per-environment that point to 
that environment''s hiera tree

ls -l /etc/puppet/hiera/data
   ...   my_env  =>  /etc/puppet/environments/my_env/hiera/data

# Our hiera.yaml file looks like this

:backends:
    - yaml
:yaml:
    :datadir: ''/etc/puppet/hiera/data''
:hierarchy:
      #                Note: fqdn should only be used to workaround 
temporary development issues
    - %{environment}/%{fqdn}/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/%{project}/%{server_env}/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/%{project}/%{server_env}/common
    - %{environment}/%{project}/%{role_name}-role/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/%{project}/%{role_name}-role/common
    - %{environment}/%{project}/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/%{location}/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/%{module_name}
    - %{environment}/common

Cheers
Larry Fast

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