Puppet - hiera not assigning parameters to module - hiera

Question

According to the Puppet documentation on hiera, the following example should work, but for some reason it's not passing the parameters to the module.
I have a simple module called hello, which takes in parameters with hello::talk, and outputs a file at /home/user/hello.txt.
Here's the class:
class hello {
// other stuff
}
define hello::talk (
$say_hello = true,
$message = '',
$say_goodbye = false,
) {
file { '/home/user/hello.txt':
owner => root, group => root, mode => 0755,
ensure => file,
content => template('hello/template.erb')
}
}
If within a node, I use it like so:
node foo {
include hello
hello::talk {'config':
say_hello = true,
message = 'howdy!',
say_goodbye = false,
}
}
It works as expected (Creating the file etc)
But if I try to do it with hiera, I can only get it to include the class, but not do the hello::talk bit.
Here's my common.yaml:
classes:
- hello
hello::talk -
say_hello = true
message = "Oh dear ..."
say_goodbye = false
And site.pp:
hiera_include('classes')
node foo {
}
No file is made :(
UPDATE
Okay, so I misunderstood the documentation a little Lol ... And I'm still misunderstanding the difference between class and define ... But I guess my brain will get to that later
I managed to get it to work by changing define hello::talk to class hello::talk and the common.yaml file to:
classes:
- hello
- hello::talk
hello::talk::say_hello = true
hello::talk::message = 'Yay! ... Kinda'
hello::talk::say_goodbye = true
This leads me onto a new question ... Is there a way that I can restructure the class, so that, like other modules, I only need to include hello and can then set the parameters. Also, it would be nice if I wouldn't have to continually use hello::talk:: to set the parameters ...

Answer 1

The main difference between classes and defines is that a class can be called only once and defines can be called multiple times if you provide different names.
Regarding your last question.
You will need to move your parameters inside your hello class and call the hello::talk class/define inside this (I will presume that hello::talk is a define here):
class hello (
say_hello = true,
message = 'howdy!',
say_goodbye = false
) {
hello::talk {'config':
say_hello => $say_hello,
message => $message ,
say_goodbye => $say_goodbye,
}
}
With the above structure you can set in hiera:
classes:
- hello
hello::say_hello: true
hello::message: 'Yay! ... Kinda'
hello::say_goodbye: true