Puppet Strings

A Puppet Face and plugin built on the YARD Documentation Tool and Puppet Future Parser. It is uses YARD and the Puppet Parser to generate HTML documentation about Puppet code and Puppet extensions written in Ruby. It will eventually replace the puppet doc command once feature parity has been achieved.

Installation

In most cases, the following will need to be installed:

• A supported Ruby version. Ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0.0 are fully supported. Anything older than Ruby 1.9 is not supported.
• A supported Puppet version. Anything older than Puppet 3.6.x is not supported.

In order to install the strings module, simply git clone this repository into your modulepath (i.e. /etc/puppet/modules) and ensure that you have the yard and rgen gems installed.

Alternatively, you can clone the repository elsewhere and run the puppet strings command directly from the source directory if you install the need gems via bundler and the provided Gemfile.

Once this module has been officially released to the Forge, you will also be able to install it using the puppet module install command.

Running Puppet Strings

If you cloned the repository into your modulepath and installed the needed gems, you can do the following to document a module:

$ cd /path/to/module
$ puppet strings

This processes README and everything in manifests/**/*.pp.

Documenting specific manifests:

$ puppet strings some_manifest.pp [another_if_you_feel_like_it.pp]

If you would like to run strings from the source directory as described above, you'll want to install the needed gems and run via bundler:

$ bundle install --path .bundle/gems
$ bundle exec puppet strings

Processing is delegated to the yardoc tool so some options listed in yard help doc are available. However, Puppet Faces do not support passing arbitrary options through a face so these options must be specified in a .yardopts file.

The strings face does offer two actions. In addition to generating a directory full of HTML, you can also serve up documentation for all your modules using the server action:

$ puppet strings serever

License

See LICENSE file.

Developing and Contributing

We love contributions from the community! If you'd like to contribute to the strings module, check out CONTRIBUTING.md to get information on the contribution process.

Running Specs

If you're going to be doing any development with puppet strings, it's essential that you can run the spec tests. You should simply have to do the following:

$ bundle install --path .bundle/gems
$ bundle exec rake spec

Support

Please log tickets and issues at our JIRA tracker. The puppet strings project can be found under PDOC on JIRA. A mailing list is available for asking questions and getting help from others. In addition there is an active #puppet channel on Freenode.

We use semantic version numbers for our releases, and recommend that users stay as up-to-date as possible by upgrading to patch releases and minor releases as they become available.

Bugfixes and ongoing development will occur in minor releases for the current major version. Security fixes will be backported to a previous major version on a best-effort basis, until the previous major version is no longer maintained.

Long-term support, including security patches and bug fixes, is available for commercial customers. Please see the following page for more details:

Puppet Enterprise Support Lifecycle

Caveats

• At the moment, only top-level Classes and Defined Types are parsed and formatted.

• Documentation blocks must immediately precede the documented code with no whitespace. This is because the comment extractor possesses the elegance and intelligance of a bag of hammers.

• This project is very much a work in progress and may very well have undiscovered bugs and pitfalls. If you discover any of these, please file a ticket.