Introduction

An S3 backend for Hiera. Use an S3 bucket to store data for the Hiera hierarchical database.

Install

gem install hiera-s3

Configure

An example hiera.yaml may look like:

---
:backends:
  - s3

:logger: console

:hierarchy:
  - "%{operatingsystem}"
  - common

:s3:
  :key: "MY_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"
  :secret: "MY_AWS_SECRET_KEY"
  :bucket: "my-s3-bucket"

Then, create an S3 bucket, such as my-hiera-data. According to the above configuration, data could then be stored like:

my-s3-bucket/Ubuntu/example/message

Where Ubuntu will match an Ubuntu host machine, example is the name of a Puppet module, and message is the name of the variable and is an object in S3. A "message" S3 object could also live in my-s3-bucket/common/example/message.

From an example Puppet module's init.pp:

class example (
    $message = 'Hello, I am the module default'
    ){
    notify { $example::message: }
}

Based on the above hiera.yaml configuration, the value in my-s3-bucket/common/example/message will take priority, followed by the value in my-s3-bucket/Ubuntu/example/message (if run on an Ubuntu host), followed by the default value defined in the module itself.

IAM roles support

If AWS key and secret are not defined in hiera.yaml, the back end will attempt to use IAM roles.

Limitations / TODO

• Assumes string variables
• Tests