The possibility of creating and adding different backends where we can store data is one of the strong points of Hiera, as it allows feeding Puppet with data from any possible source.
This allows integrations with existing tools and gives more options to provide data in a safe and controlled way, for example, a custom web frontend or a CMDB.
Let's review some of the most interesting backends that exist.
Hiera-file (https://github.com/adrienthebo/hiera-file) has been conceived by Adrien Thebo to manage a kind of data that previously couldn't be stored in a sane way in Hiera—that is, plain files.
To install it, just clone the previous Git repository in our modulepath or use its gem as follows:
gem install hiera-file
We configure it by specifying a datadir path where our data files are placed:
---
:backends:
- file
:hierarchy:
- "fqdn/%{fqdn}"
- "role/%{role}"
- "common"
:file:
:datadir: /etc/puppetlabs/code/dataHere, the key used for Hiera lookups is...