Ability to lint/validate plans prior to executing

[nmaludy]

Use Case

As a bolt module developer i'm human and sometimes make mistakes. Often i mistype the name of a task or plan when passed into run_task or run_plan. It would be great if we could perform an initial sanity check on the plan structure prior to execution so that it can fail early, instead of waiting for potentially a long time then only to find the error in the middle of an execution.

Describe the Solution You Would Like

Some ideas that would be great to lint/validate:

• Task and plan names (passed into run_task and run_plan)
• Task and plan parameter names and types (if possible, obviously if the user doesn't specify a type, we can't validate it).
• Basic Puppet syntax, currently syntax errors fail when they're encountered instead of upfront.

Obviously there are limitations on this, for example if the user passes a variable as the task/plan name, we can't validate it exists. I think there are a lot of positives though and could potentially catch a good number of errors.

In regular Puppet land i believe we want to emulate puppet parser validate , but for Bolt. Maybe the CLI syntax would look something like:

bolt plan validate mymodule::myplan

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

I think the other alternative would be spec testing, some way to exercise the "bones" of a plan before running.

[adreyer]

For people writing plans that don't process the results of actions simply allowing all actions and providing simple input is probably the best way to provide this level of testing.

[sanfrancrisko]

We have a similar request over in a Discussion in the pdk repo: https://github.com/puppetlabs/pdk/discussions/1057

[davidsandilands]

Just to tag this has been an issue for some PE customers @Adam-Shambrook

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has not had activity for 60 days and will be marked as stale. If this issue continues to have no activity for 7 days, it will be closed.

[jay7x]

I did this PR into PDK repo while ago but then found signing CLA can be problematic on my previous job. But now I signed it already so we can proceed with it there.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has not had activity for 60 days and will be marked as stale. If this issue continues to have no activity for 7 days, it will be closed.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is stale and has been closed. If you believe this is in error, or would like the Bolt team to reconsider it, please reopen the issue.