Presentation given at Config Management Camp 2016 in the Foreman track, that gives an introduction to the basic usage, different types and architecture of parameters. Contact me for original LibreOffice Impress slides with animations.

1. Introduction To
Parameters
Tomer Brisker && Ori Rabin

2. About Us
Tomer Brisker
● Lives in Tel Aviv
● Software Engineer @
Red Hat
● Father of Luna

3. About Us
Tomer Brisker
● Lives in Tel Aviv
● Software Engineer @
Red Hat
● Father of Luna

4. About Us
Tomer Brisker
● Lives in Tel Aviv
● Software Engineer @
Red Hat
● Father of Luna
Ori Rabin
● Lives 5 minutes from
the office
● Software Engineer @
Red Hat
● Is the only girl on the
team

5. Parameters – what is it good for?

6. Well, actually quite a few things...
● Templating:
– Provisioning templates
– Partition table templates
– Remote Execution job templates
● Configuration Management:
– Puppet variables
– Puppet class parameters
– Salt pillars
– Ansible host and group variables
● Scripting
● Anywhere you wish!

7. Two kinds of parameters
“Smart” Parameters
● More flexible
● Types
● User-defined order
● Validations
● Mergeable overrides
● Attached to puppet
classes (for now)
“Simple” Parameters
● Key-value
● Strings
● Fixed order
● No validation
● Only overrides

8. Global Parameters

9. Global Parameters

10. Smart Class Parameters

11. Smart Class Parameters

12. Smart Class Parameters

13. Smart Class Parameters

14. Smart Class Parameters

15. Smart Class Parameters

16. Smart Class Parameters

17. Smart Class Parameters

18. Smart Class Parameters

19. Smart Class Parameters

20. Smart Class Parameters

21. Smart Class Parameters

22. Smart Class Parameters

23. Smart Variables

24. Smart Variables

25. Smart Variables

26. Host YAML

27. Host YAML

28. Host YAML

29. Host YAML

30. Classification
CC-BY-2.5 Drew R. Eddy, Julia A. Clarke - http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017932

31. Classification

32. We looked at the code

33. But, it's actually pretty simple...
● Override order: fqdn, hostgroup, os
● Matchers:
– fqdn = myHost.example.com value = “lions”
– hostgroup = example value = “tigers”
– os = myWeirdOs value = “bears”
● Default value: “oh my!”
● You decide the order
● Globals are a bit different
● And that's it!

34. Host(group) Form

35. Host(group) Form

36. Host(group) Form

37. Host(group) Form

38. Host(group) Form

39. Host(group) Form

40. Host(group) Form

41. Host(group) Form

42. Audits

43. Audits

44. Plans for the future
● Make all parameters smart
● Continue UI improvements
● Organization/Location scoping
● Versioning
● Import/Export

45. Questions?
Thank you!
You can find us:
#theforeman and #theforeman-dev on freenode
foreman-users@googlegroups.com
@tbrisker_pro on twitter