32. Troubleshooting

32.1. Error in manifest is not considered an error by cdist

Situation: You are executing other scripts from a manifest. This script fails, but cdist does not recognise the error. An example script would be something like this:

% cat ~/.cdist/manifest/init
"$__manifest/special"
% cat ~/.cdist/manifest/special
#!/bin/sh
echo "Here is an unclean exiting script"
somecommandthatdoesnotexist
echo "I continue here although previous command failed"

We can clearly see that somecommandthatdoesnotexist will fail in ~/.cdist/manifest/special. But as the custom script is not called with the -e flag (exit on failure) of shell, it does not lead to an error. And thus cdist sees the exit 0 code of the last echo line instead of the failing command.

All scripts executed by cdist carry the -e flag. To prevent the above from happening, there are three solutions available, two of which can be used in the calling script:

# Execute as before, but abort on failure
sh -e "$__manifest/special"

# Source the script in our namespace, runs in a set -e environment:
. "$__manifest/special"

The third solution is to include a shebang header in every script you write to use the -e flag:

% cat ~/.cdist/manifest/special
#!/bin/sh -e
...

32.2. Using debug dump helper script

Since cdist stores data to local cache that can be used for debugging there is a helper script that dumps data from local cache, cdist-dump.

For more info see:

cdist-dump -h

Or from cdist git cloned directory:

./scripts/cdist-dump -h