Using Puppet VSCode plugin on NixOS

The problem to solve

The full functionality of the Puppet VSCode plugin requires a proper installation of the PDK or the puppet agent. Unforuntaly the way how NixOS installs the PDK or the puppet agent is not compatilbe with the VSCode plugin.

Using devenv to emulate an puppet agent installation

Using devenv we can create an environment suiteable for the plugin to regognize it aa puppet installation.

Caveats:

• You need to specify an absolute path for the puppet agent installation in the vscode settings.
• We need to pin ruby json library because the language server is not compatible with recent versions.

vsocde settings

{
    "puppet.installType": "agent",
    "puppet.installDirectory": "/full/path/to/repo/.devenv/state/.bundle/ruby/3.2.0",
    // only required for debugging
    //"puppet.editorService.loglevel": "debug",
    //"puppet.editorService.debugFilePath": "puppet-debug.log"
}

When opening the example file, you should something similar like this. (Notice the tooltip when you hover over a property, e.g. ensure).

Happy Coding!

Recommandations

This repository provides a full setup for running puppet bolt. Some dependencies might not be strictly required just for using the VSCode plugin. It's recommended to install direnv for automatic activiation of the devenv.

Install the devenv vscode plugin and the Nix IDE vscode plugin.

Usage

# clone this repo
git clone git@github.com:roock/nixos-vscode-puppet.git
cd nixos-vscode-puppet
# allow direnv in this directory
direnv allow .
# setup vscode settingsd
echo "{
    "puppet.installType": "agent",
    "puppet.installDirectory": "$PWD/.devenv/state/.bundle/ruby/3.2.0",
}" | tee .vscode/settings.json
code .

Open Issues

• This has been tested with the vscode-fhs NixOS package. Testing with the vscode, vscodium or vscodium-fhs is still outstanding.