Puppet-lint

Puppet Lint will test modules and manifests against the recommended Puppet style guidelines from the Puppet Labs style guide as closely as practical. It is not meant to validate syntax. Please use puppet parser validate for that.

Installation

gem install puppet-lint

Usage

By hand

You can test a single manifest file by running

puppet-lint <path to file>

Puppet Lint has a large number of options to modify which checks should be run.

You can disable any of the checks when running the puppet-lint command by adding a --no-<check name>-check flag to the command. For example, if you wanted to skip the 140 character check, you would run

    puppet-lint --no-140chars-check <path to file>

You can also instruct puppet-lint to automatically fix issues it detects with the --fix flag.

    puppet-lint --fix /modules

Note that this can be combined with the --only-checks option to help avoid enormous patch sets.

    puppet-lint --only-checks trailing_whitespace --fix modules/

You can also use control comments to disable checks within puppet code on a per line or per block basis using #lint:ignore:<check_name>:

    class foo {
      $bar = 'bar'
      # This ignores the double_quoted_strings check over multiple lines
      # lint:ignore:double_quoted_strings
      $baz = "baz"
      $gronk = "gronk"
      # lint:endignore

      # This ignores the 140chars check on a single line
      $this_line_has_a_really_long_name_and_value_that_is_much_longer_than_the_style_guide_recommends = "I mean, a really, really long line like you can't believe" # lint:ignore:140chars
    }

See puppet-lint --help for a full list of options.

Rake

If you want to test your entire Puppet manifest directory, you can add require 'puppet-lint/tasks/puppet-lint' to your Rakefile and then run

rake lint

If you want to modify the default behaviour of the rake task, you can modify the PuppetLint configuration by defining the task yourself.

PuppetLint::RakeTask.new :lint do |config|
  # Pattern of files to check, defaults to `**/*.pp`
  config.pattern = 'modules'

  # Pattern of files to ignore
  config.ignore_paths = ['modules/apt', 'modules/stdlib']

  # List of checks to disable
  config.disable_checks = ['documentation', '140chars']

  # Should puppet-lint prefix it's output with the file being checked,
  # defaults to true
  config.with_filename = false

  # Should the task fail if there were any warnings, defaults to false
  config.fail_on_warnings = true

  # Format string for puppet-lint's output (see the puppet-lint help output
  # for details
  config.log_format = '%{filename} - %{message}'

  # Print out the context for the problem, defaults to false
  config.with_context = true

  # Enable automatic fixing of problems, defaults to false
  config.fix = true

  # Show ignored problems in the output, defaults to false
  config.show_ignored = true

  # Compare module layout relative to the module root
  config.relative = true
end

Settings

puppet-lint will also check for a .puppet-lint.rc file in the current directory and your home directory and read in flags from there, so if you wanted to always skip the hard tab character check, you could create ~/.puppet-lint.rc containing

--no-hard_tabs-check

Compatibility Warning

Release 2.1.0 of puppet-lint is the last planned version with support for Puppet 3 and Ruby 1.8.7. Future versions will drop support for these versions.

Implemented Tests

At the moment, the following tests have been implemented:

Spacing, Indentation & Whitespace

• Must use two-space soft tabs.
• Must not use literal tab characters.
• Must not contain trailing white space.
• Should not exceed an 140 character line width
  • An exception has been made for source => 'puppet://...' lines as splitting these over multiple lines decreases the readability of the manifests.
• Should align arrows (=>) within blocks of attributes.

Quoting

• All strings that do not contain variables should be enclosed in single quotes.
  • An exception has been made for double quoted strings containing \n or \t.
• All strings that contain variables must be enclosed in double quotes.
• All variables should be enclosed in braces when interpolated in a string.
• Variables standing by themselves should not be quoted.

Capitalization

• All variables should be in lowercase

Resources

• All resource titles should be quoted.
  • An exception has been made for resource titles that consist of only a variable standing by itself.
• If a resource declaration includes an ensure attribute, it should be the first attribute specified.
• Symbolic links should be declared by using an ensure value of link and explicitly specifying a value for the target attribute.
• File modes should be represented as a 4 digit string enclosed in single quotes or use symbolic file modes.

Conditionals

• You should not intermingle conditionals inside resource declarations (i.e. selectors inside resources).
• Case statements should have a default case.

Classes

• Relationship declarations with the chaining syntax should only be used in the 'left to right' direction.
• Classes should not be defined inside a class.
• Defines should not be defined inside a class.
• Classes should not inherit between namespaces.
• Required parameters in class & defined type definitions should be listed before optional parameters.
• When using top-scope variables, including facts, Puppet modules should explicitly specify the empty namespace.

Disabling checks

puppet-lint

You can disable any of the checks when running the puppet-lint command by adding a --no-<check name>-check flag to the command. For example, if you wanted to skip the 140 character check, you would run

puppet-lint --no-140chars-check /path/to/my/manifest.pp

puppet-lint will also check for a .puppet-lint.rc file in the current directory and your home directory and read in flags from there, so if you wanted to always skip the hard tab character check, you could create ~/.puppet-lint.rc containing

--no-hard_tabs-check

For a list of all the flags just type:

puppet-lint --help

Rake task

You can also disable checks when running puppet-lint through the supplied Rake task. Simply add the following line after the require statement in your Rakefile.

PuppetLint.configuration.send("disable_<check name>")

So, to disable the 140 character check, you would add:

PuppetLint.configuration.send("disable_140chars")

The Rake task also supports ignoring certain paths from being linted:

PuppetLint.configuration.ignore_paths = ["vendor/**/*.pp"]

Reporting bugs or incorrect results

If you find a bug in puppet-lint or its results, please create an issue in the repo issues tracker. Bonus points will be awarded if you also include a patch that fixes the issue.

Thank You

Many thanks to the following people for contributing to puppet-lint

• James Turnbull (@kartar)
• Jan Vansteenkiste (@vStone)
• Julian Simpson (@simpsonjulian)
• S. Zachariah Sprackett (@zsprackett)

As well as the many people who have reported the issues they've had!

License

Copyright (c) 2011-2016 Tim Sharpe

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.