Tim Sharpe

puppet-lint 1.0.0

19 Aug 2014

It’s been a long time coming but I’m happy to announce the release of puppet-lint 1.0.0!

Along with a bunch of bugfixes and a rewrite of most of the code, there’s some (hopefully) exciting new features in this release.

Automatic fixing of errors

Previewed in the 0.4.0 pre-release, simple problems can now be automatically fixed by puppet-lint (some problems require complex refactoring and so puppet-lint won’t attempt anything on your behalf).

In 1.0.0, problems detected by the following checks can be automatically fixed by running puppet-lint with --fix:

  • slash_comments
  • star_comments
  • unquoted_node_name
  • unquoted_resource_title
  • unquoted_file_mode
  • file_mode
  • ensure_not_symlink_target
  • double_quoted_strings
  • only_variable_string
  • variables_not_enclosed
  • quoted_booleans
  • hard_tabs
  • trailing_whitespace
  • arrow_alignment

Complimentary to --fix, puppet-lint now has a --only-checks parameter that you can pass a comma seperated list of checks that you want to run. This works great when doing an initial pass over your code to fix problems. Let’s say that you just want to realign all your =>s, run puppet-lint --fix --only-checks arrow_alignment modules/.

Plugin system

From it’s inception, puppet-lint has enforced the official style guide and I’ve had to turn down a lot of good ideas and contributions because they’re not a part of that guide. To that end, I’ve added a plugin system in 1.0.0 so that we can add and distribute custom checks outside of the main code base.

My hope is that together as a community we can come up with some new checks and influence new versions of the style guide. I’ve written a tutorial that steps through how to write a basic check. If you’ve got a good idea for a check but aren’t up to writing it yourself, create an issue in the puppet-lint repo with the “new check” label and maybe someone else will be able to.

You can find the currently tiny list of community plugins here. They’re distributed as Ruby Gems so you can easily install them however you’re currently managing puppet-lint (gem, bundler, etc).

Control comments

A much requested feature, you can now disable tests via special comments in your code. Read more about it here.

New checks

A couple of new checks have been added to core puppet-lint in 1.0.0.

  • unquoted_node_name - Checks for unquoted node names
  • puppet_url_without_modules - Checks for fileserver URLs without the modules mountpoint.

What’s gone

The class_parameter_defaults check has been removed. This check was based on a misreading of the style guide.

For a more complete list of changes, I’d recommend reading the changelog.


Copyright 2020 Tim Sharpe

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