How do I access an environment variable in a puppet manifest?

Question

How do I access an environment variable (from the puppet daemon's environment) in a puppet manifest?

Answer 1

I think we need more informations on what you are trying to achieve... Facter exposes by default FACTER_ environment variables :

https://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/faq.html#can-i-access-environment-variables-with-facter

 $ FACTER_FOO="bar" 
 $ export FACTER_FOO
 $ facter | grep 'foo'
   foo => bar

But for $PATH or $USER... Why not tells puppet to use a given path or a user (for an exec ?) explicitly ?

Answer 2

You'd need to use a server side function for this if you want the puppetmaster's environment. Since facter gets you client facts.

$RUBYLIB/puppet/parser/functions/env.rb:

module Puppet::Parser::Functions
  newfunction(:env) do |args|
    variable = args[0]
    ENV[variable]
  end
end

Use it in your manifests like:

$blah = env("PATH")

Answer 3

From what I can tell Puppet runs without any Bash environment variables. It seems to get all its environment from Facter. There is a script here to import your regular envvars as Facter envvars.

Answer 4

In Puppet enterprise 2.5.1 you can access it via /etc/env.

Also check whether you have the correct environment defined in your /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/puppet.conf -- it should look something like this:

[production]
  modulepath = /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/environments/production/modules:/opt/puppet/share/puppet/modules
  manifest   = /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/environments/production/manifests/site.pp

Answer 5

The answer is a bit disappointing: You can't (unless you enhance Puppet or Facter). I recently wrote a short blog post about this topic: Accessing environment variables within Puppet

A short summary: Facter is running on every Puppet agent system. Simply enhance Facter to collect all environment variables and then you can access them within Puppet manifests.

Hope that helps!