Tagging hosts and being able to apply puppet enc values based on tags

Support
1

So I haven’t seen this supported natively but in some searching came across a (very) out dated plugin (mentioned in Feature #11733: Assign tags to hosts - Foreman), but how feasible is it to tag hosts. So say I have 5 hosts. A single host group doesn’t always fit as things may over lap. Nesting doesn’t fit because of layering. Being able to set a couple values based on tags where it doesn’t matter what the hierarchical grouping is seems like it would offer significantly increased flexibility. Is something like this in/on the roadmap at all?

I don’t know if this should be a “replacement” to host groups or something that can augment host groups. I can see some arguments on all sides.

2

While not being exactly what you are looking for, maybe you could achieve your goal via Fact based matchers? Here is the docs on that: Foreman :: Manual
Depending on what exactly you are basing the differentiation of the hosts on, maybe checking for a simple fact could be enough?
If that does not solve your problem, I know of no other solution. There is to my knowledge currently no tagging mechanism in Foreman, especially none that would allow to be used as a matcher for Smart Class Parameters.

3

If you use Katello, then maybe host collections would do the trick? Although I’m not sure if you can match on those.

I haven’t heard anything about that.

4

Thanks all. We do not use katello today and not sure I want to add it (no reason other than “just one more thing” mentality).

I don’t think facts would work as part of what we need is that initial aspect where the fact value/tag would come from.

but you do have me wondering if we can do this via host params as an array which we can match an entry on. might be a poor mans version of “tags”…