Installing and configuring Hiera

From Puppet 3.x, Hiera has been officially integrated, and it is installed as a dependency when we install Puppet.

On Puppet 2.x, we need to install Hiera separately on the node where the Puppet Master resides: we need both the hiera and hiera-puppet packages, either via the OS native packaging system or via gem.

Hiera is not required on the clients unless they operate in a Masterless setup.

Its configuration file is hiera.yaml, and its path depends on how it is invoked, which can be either of the following ways:

• When invoked from Puppet, the path will be /etc/puppet/hiera.yaml (/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml for Puppet Enterprise)
• When invoked from the CLI or when used within Ruby code, the path is /etc/hiera.yaml

It makes sense to create a symlink, and be sure to always use and edit the same file using the following command:

ln -s /etc/hiera.yaml /etc/puppet/hiera.yaml

The file is a YAML hash, where the top-level keys are Ruby symbols with a colon (:) prefix...