Puppet

One thing that this does not cover is the need/want to be able to specify an environment on the command line. Currrently, if you use something like:

puppetd --environment=foo --test --noop

Whatever is defined in the external node database will be used instead of what was passed on the command line. This makes it hard to do a noop check on a production node that you can’t or do not want to actually move to testing or development.

Can we somehow force the command line parameter to override all?

Daniel Beckham wrote:

Whatever is defined in the external node database will be used instead of what was passed on the command line. This makes it hard to do a noop check on a production node that you can’t or do not want to actually move to testing or development. Can we somehow force the command line parameter to override all?

The external node classifier is not just a database; it can contain arbitrary code. Under my proposal, I think you could satisfy your use case (which is also a use case that I have) using logic like this in the external node classifier:

if (client asked to be in the testing or development environment,
    and client would normally be in the production environment)
{
    allow client to be in the environment that it asked for
}
else
{
    ignore what client asked for
}