Puppet

It’s pretty common to get puppet agent running with a set of command line arguments, e.g. —server, and then run —genconfig, and have puppet just use that. The problem is if puppet has performed fact syncing, so the vardir/facts directory exists, then puppet agent will not start, because it thinks vardir/facts should be a file and will refuse to remove the existing directory.

This issue occurs because Puppet::Util::Settings::FileSetting#type relies on either the setting name containing ‘dir’ or that the value ends with a trailing slash. The setting as contained in the defaults.rb (or output by genconfig) does contain a trailing slash.

But Puppet::Util::Settings::FileSettings#munge uses File.expand_path which strips the trailing slash off. This change was made in commit:97c043f4

This is occurs on Mac and I’ve seen it on windows too.

To reproduce:

$ puppet agent --test
...
$ ll ~/.puppet/var/
...
drwxr-xr-x  2 josh  staff    68B Oct 31 22:11 facts/
$ puppet agent --genconfig > puppet.conf
$ puppet agent --config puppet.conf
Could not prepare for execution: Got 1 failure(s) while initializing: change from directory to file failed: Could not set 'file on ensure: Is a directory - /Users/josh/.puppet/var/facts

Comment out the following, then it will start:

#factdest = /Users/josh/.puppet/var/facts/

Or remove existing directory, and it will start:

$ rm -rf ~/.puppet
$ puppet agent --config puppet.conf

Relying on a trailing slash is extremely fragile