The main goal of this project is, for now, to assist sysadmins editing their catalogs. The best illustration is, for now, the puppetresources application. It can:

• Check a file syntax, and print what it thinks it is.
• Compute a whole catalog and display it in human readable format or JSON.
• Display details about a specific resource in a catalog, including special support for file contents (useful for debugging templates).
• And do the two previous items using facts and/or queried data from a real PuppetDB.

It is also fast enough to compute the catalogs of all your nodes in reasonable time, which opens possibilities you would not even dream of in the Ruby Puppet world. One of them is writing “integration tests” that let you check properties related to complex environmental interactions between hosts.

In order to facilitate this, I am in the process of writing a fully fledged testing API (it is still a bit lacking). It is strongly inspired by other testing APIs and should quickly evolve into something that is very easy to use. It is not the current focus (which is to replace an actual Puppet Master with my software), but I already implemented a test that is built in the puppetresources executable: it now checks that each source parameter in each file resources points to an actual file. This is a common error pattern to me (forgetting to create the file, mistyping its name, or placing it in the wrong directory) that has now disappeared.

Oh by the way, a new version is out ! Version 0.3.2 mainly changes the license, from GPL3 to BSD3. The choice was dictated by the sudden outburst of horribly uninteresting posts about licensing that has plagued Haskell-cafe during the last few hours. I hope this will end soon, or it will not be possible to differentiate this mailing list from that of Debian.