Puppet

I have put all the keys in individual text files, and used template() to fetch the value and pass to ssh_authorized_key’s key attribute. The problem with this is that my text files contains a trailing newline[1], and this newline was copied verbatim into the resulting file, so it became

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1y…….ojH2ZMvF+Efw== kjetilho@puppet

That is, it was split across two lines. On the next run, ssh_authorized_key aborts since the file contains a syntax error…[2]

In any case, Puppet should never generate files it can’t handle, so there are two options IMHO:

1) strip whitespace from key before writing it to file. drop the resource processing if it’s not valid base64. 2) drop the resource processing if it’s not valid base64.

I think my usecase of putting the keys in individual files is common enough that whitespace trimming should be done. It would also allow splitting inline values into multi-line strings.

Workaround: use regsubst() to remove the newline from the templated value.

[1] I really don’t like text files with no terminating newline, it makes diff slightly unhappy etc. [2] The parser is very fickle in general, it bombs on empty lines, too. Please fix that when you’re at it, not worth a separate issue I think :)