Set Environment Variables with Puppet

Question

I am using vagrant with puppet to set up virtual machines for development environments. I would like to simply set a few environment variables in the .pp file. Using virtual box and a vagrant base box for Ubuntu 64 bit.

I have this currently.

$bar = 'bar'  class foobar {    exec { 'foobar':      command => "export Foo=${bar}",    } } 

but when provisioning I get an error: Could not find command 'export'.

This seems like it should be simple enough am I missing some sort of require or path for the exec type? I noticed in the documentation there is an environment option to set up environment variables, should I be using that?

Answer 1

If you only need the variables available in the puppet run, whats wrong with :

Exec { environment => [ "foo=$bar" ] } 

?

Answer 2

Simplest way to acomplish this is to put your env vars in /etc/environment, this ensures they are available to everything (or pretty much everything).

Something like this:

class example($somevar) {     file { "/etc/environment":         content => inline_template("SOMEVAR=${somevar}")     } } 

Reason for having the class parameterised is so you can target it from hiera with automatic variable lookup (http://docs.puppetlabs.com/hiera/1/puppet.html#automatic-parameter-lookup) ... if you're sticking something in /etc/environment, it's usually best if you actually make it environment specific.

note: I've only tested this on ubuntu