log_dir not respected from Hiera

[jarro2783]

When I set log_dir using Hiera, that directory is not being respected, and instead the default directory of /var/log/nginx is used.

Affected Puppet, Ruby, OS and module versions/distributions

• Puppet: 3.7
• Ruby: 2.1.5
• Distribution: Ubuntu
• Module version: 0.6.0

How to reproduce (e.g Puppet code you use)

Hiera:

nginx::log_dir: '/mnt/logs'

What are you seeing

Server files that are written by Puppet have /var/log for the access and error logs in them.

What behaviour did you expect instead

I expect log paths to have /mnt/logs at the start.

Any additional information you'd like to impart

I suspect that this is due to the way that Puppet looks up parameters. The parameters http_access_log and http_error_log use log_dir, i.e., http_access_log => "${log_dir}/${::nginx::params::http_access_log_file}". I suspect that in that context, log_dir is the default, and not the one that I have provided in Hiera.

[ubellavance]

It works for me. If I don't set the parameter, all logs go to /var/log/nginx/ for each of my server blocks. If I set the nginx::log_dir value, all the access_log and error_log directives in all my server blocks use this value instead of /var/log/nginx/. I personnaly use the nginx package from RHEL 7 Software Collections and its default log dir is /var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx/ and I use the nginx::log_dir parameter to set it. If you want to set the global log dirs, though, you need to use these parameters:

nginx::http_access_log: '/var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx/access.log'
nginx::nginx_error_log: '/var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx/error.log'

[jarro2783]

Maybe it's a Puppet 3 thing. Which version of Puppet are you using?

[ubellavance]

3.6

[jarro2783]

Are you setting it in Hiera?

It works if I explicitly do this:

  class { '::nginx':
    log_dir => hiera('nginx::log_dir'),
  }

But if I have it set in Hiera and just do include nginx, then it doesn't use the one I set.

[ubellavance]

Here's what I originally had:

class profile::rpnginx  {

  class { 'nginx':  }
}

I changed it to include nginx and a puppet run changes nothing.

In both cases if I change this:

nginx::log_dir: '/var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx'

to

nginx::log_dir: '/var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx2'

a puppet noop run tells me that it would change the access and error logs path for all my servers (vhosts).

Can you run this on your puppet master:

hiera nginx::log_dir fqdn=server.example.com --debug

[ubellavance]

Yes, I set nginx::log_dir: in hiera.

# hiera -c /etc/puppet/hiera.yaml nginx::log_dir fqdn=server.example.com --debug
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 08:12:46 -0500: Hiera YAML backend starting
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 08:12:46 -0500: Looking up nginx::log_dir in YAML backend
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 08:12:46 -0500: Looking for data source host/aserver.example.com
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 08:12:46 -0500: Found nginx::log_dir in host/server.example.com
/var/opt/rh/rh-nginx18/log/nginx

[jarro2783]

We don't have puppet masters. On the node:

/etc/puppet$ bin/hiera -c hiera.yaml nginx::log_dir --debug
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 17:39:02 -0500: Hiera YAML backend starting
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 17:39:02 -0500: Looking up nginx::log_dir in YAML backend
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 17:39:02 -0500: Looking for data source common
DEBUG: 2017-02-23 17:39:02 -0500: Found nginx::log_dir in common
/mnt/logs/nginx

[jarro2783]

I'll try to make a test case to reproduce this.

[ubellavance]

You're setting log_dir in common.yaml? So all your servers have this parameter set?

[ubellavance]

Have you tried with the current master, just in case? Did you try running puppet apply with --debug just to make sure you didn't miss an error?

[jarro2783]

Yes we have it set in our top level Hiera file. All the hosts I have checked on have the wrong path set in the generated files.

I just migrated our code to v0.6.0 and was having this problem with several hosts. I think I had the same problem on v0.5.0 but didn't realise that it was the problem at the time.

What sort of errors would I be looking for? If Puppet succeeded then why would there be any other errors?

[ubellavance]

I don't know... I find hiera especially hard to troubleshoot. Can you give us more details? (Full hiera configs, full generated file example)

[jarro2783]

Just noticed something playing around. It is only in nginx.conf that there is a problem. The servers all have the correct path.

[ubellavance]

The configs in nginx.conf are different than servers'. Check my first comment in this issue.

[jarro2783]

Ok that makes sense now. This seems like a bug to me. Setting nginx::log_dir should be enough, and in fact it is enough when you set it through Puppet. So the bug is that when set through Hiera it doesn't work.