Puppet templates and undefined/nil variables
- by larsks
I often want to include default values in Puppet templates. I was hoping that given a class like this:
class myclass ($a_variable=undef) {
file { '/tmp/myfile':
content => template('myclass/myfile.erb'),
}
}
I could make a template like this:
a_variable = <%= a_variable || "a default value" %>
Unfortunately, undef in Puppet doesn't translate to a Ruby nil value in the context of the template, so this doesn't actually work. What is the canonical way of handling default values in Puppet templates?
I can set the default value to an empty string and then use the empty? test...
a variable = <%= a_variable.empty? ? "a default value" : a_variable %>
...but that seems a little clunky.
