Function to read role, environment file in masterless puppet - ruby

Question

I'm working with Puppet 4.5 in masterless configuration and am trying to create a Puppet function to read a simple config file that assigns roles and environments. I don't have any integration with hiera/facter that I can change.
The file format is:
host1::java_app_node::qa
host2::nodejs_app_node::prod
The Puppet function that will read this file is in a module called homebase. I want to function to return a hash or array of hashes that split the config values. This will let me use them in templates.
In modules/homebase/manifests/init.pp I define:
$role_file = 'puppet://role.lst'
I then created modules/homebase/functions/get_roles.pp as follows:
function homebase::get_roles() {
$func_name = 'homebase::get_roles()'
if ! File.exists?($::homebase::role_file) {
fail("Could not find #{$::homebase::role_file}")
}
hosts = { }
File.open($::homebase::role_file).each |line| {
parts = line.split(/::/)
hosts[parts[0]] = { 'host' => parts[0], 'role' => parts[1], 'env' => parts[2] }
}
return hosts
}
In other classes, I then want to call:
class myapp {
$servers = homebase::get_roles().each | k, v | {
$v['host'] if $v['role'] =~ /myapp/ && $v['env'] == $environment
}
file { 'myapp.cfg':
ensure => file,
path => '/opt/myapp/myapp.cfg',
source => template("/myapp/myapp.cfg.erb"),
mode => '0644',
owner => myuser,
group => myuser,
}
}
Seems like there would be a better way to do this. Am I completely off base?

Answer 1

There turned out to be a much easier way to this rather than try to create a function to read a non-standard configuration file. Instead, I used a site.pp file to create node {} entries. I also parameterized the myapp class to take inputs based on the node.
So my site.pp looks like:
node 'server1.mydomain', 'server2.mydomain' {
$myvar = [ 'val1', 'val2' ]
class { 'myapp':
values => $myvar
}
}
This could probably be improved. One of the issues is with a non-Puppet configuration file I was able to also able to control execution in my bash wrapper script. Much of the need for that went away when, though, with the node definitions.