Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

Types of Hiera data

As we've seen, Hiera data is stored in text files, structured using the format called YAML Ain't Markup Language, which is a common way of organizing data. Here's another snippet from our sample Hiera data file, which you'll find at /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/pbg/data/common.yaml on the VM:

  syslog_server: '10.170.81.32'
  monitor_ips:
    - '10.179.203.46'
    - '212.100.235.160'
    - '10.181.120.77'
    - '94.236.56.148'
  cobbler_config:
    manage_dhcp: true
    pxe_just_once: true

There are actually three different kinds of Hiera data structures present: single values, arrays, and hashes. We'll examine these in detail in a moment.

Single values

Most Hiera data consists of a key associated with a single value, as in the previous example:

syslog_server: ...