Predicting package version

Question

I'm configuring syslog-ng through puppet on my servers. The configuration files are very different between versions 2.x, 3.1 and 3.3 . On my hosts, depending on the operating system (centos5, centos6, debian 7, ubuntu), the available syslog-ng version will vary.

I had 2 ideas to adapt the configuration of syslog-ng to the correct version :

Custom Fact : It's easy to write a custom fact to test the installed version of syslog-ng. But this fact will be useless if syslog-ng is not already installed.
Conditions in the manifest : I find it a bit ugly to define a "case" in the manifest wich would determine the version of syslog-ng that the operatingsystem provides.

For me, the cleanest way to do this is to test which version of the package is available through the operatingsystem before installation. A facter could do this, but I guess it would be a bit difficult.

Is there a puppetish way to solve my problem ?

Peter Souter · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-29 16:15:17Z

1

There is indeed puppet-ish way to solve this problem!

You can combine $::osfamily with $::operatingsystemrelease to do something like this in your manifests:

case $::osfamily {
  'CentOS': { 
    case $::operatingsystemrelease {
       /^6/: { include syslog-ng::centos6 }
       /^5/: { include syslog-ng::centos5 }
       default: { notice("This operating system release for CentOs '${::operatingsystemrelease}' is not supported.")
    }
   }
   default:  { notice "Unsupported osfamily ${::osfamily}" }
}

answered Aug 29, 2013 at 16:15

Peter Souter

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1 Comment

skizo Over a year ago

Having a subclass for each case seems clean. Though you have to know in advance wich distribution ships which version of the package, and I would have liked to avoid this knowledge.

iamauser · Accepted Answer · 2013-08-29 18:33:12Z

I am not sure I understood all of your problem. In any case, one can use puppet package type to ensure a particular version and use $lsbdistdescription to get the OS name. For example :

package { 'syslog-ng' :
    ensure => $::lsbdistdescription {
    '/CentOS 7/': => "3.2",
    '/CentOS 6/': => "3.1",
    '/(Debian|Ubuntu)/' => "2.x",
    default => "latest",
   },
}

NOTE: In the above one has to get the exact name of the OS, i.e. CentOS 7 or CentOS 6 or Ubuntu from each OS. You can do that by executing facter --puppet | grep lsbdistdescription on the OS. I don't have variety of machines, so I couldn't check that exactly.

Then the configuration file can be just one sourced from a template. The template will vary based on the OS.

file { 'file.cfg' :
    ensure => "present",
    content => template("modulename/file.erb"),
    require => Package["syslog-ng"],
}

Hope it helps.

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