Simple Puppet module grepper (prototype)

puppet

<tl;dr> Search for puppet resources values using puppet, not just plain text</tl;dr> One of the ideas that has been sitting on my todo list is having a command that lets me grep a puppet manifest for certain properties, values or even just resources in a smarter way than just running a raw grep over files. While a simple grep works in some cases it is annoyingly fragile when you’re trying to ignore literal strings in resource types that you’re not interested in or narrow your search down to resources that have a property that can also appear in other types.

  # Show all file resources with a mode of 644
  $ pm-grep -t file -p mode -v 644 files.pp

  # Show all host resources with an alias of any value
  $ pm-grep -t host -p host_aliases hosts.pp

  # Check a number of pp files at once
  $ find /etc/puppet/modules/ -name "*.pp" | xargs -n 1 pm-grep -t file -p mode

pm-grep (puppet manifest grep) isn’t anywhere near finished but it does work on simple manifests. It yet doesn’t handle corner cases, global parameter defaults and a number of other more advanced techniques but it does fulfil some of my needs and has given me some more to mull over for version 2.