Puppet

I’ve templates that conditionally print sections of a file like this

<% if has_variable?(“ssh:wants_firewall_rule”) %> -A INPUT -m state —state NEW -m tcp -p tcp —dport 22 -j ACCEPT <% end %>

then in the ssh class I just define

class ssh { $wants_firewall_rule = 1 #…… }

This works fine on nodes that ‘include ssh’ as planned. On classes that don’t, however, rather than has_variable?() evaluating to false, puppetd dies with the error:

[root@node03 ~]# puppetd -tv info: Retrieving plugins err: Could not retrieve catalog: Failed to parse template iptables/iptables.erb: Class ssh has not been evaluated so its variables cannot be referenced at /etc/puppet/modules/iptables/manifests/init.pp:11 on node node03.pixie warning: Not using cache on failed catalog

I don’t feel it’s an error for has_variable? to return false in this situation.