:date: 2014-07-04 09:20

.. index:: tech, vim, puppet

VIM and Puppet
==============
Digging more and more into `Puppet <http://www.puppetlabs.com>`_ I find myself exploring several different editor to play with.

After using Geppetto as the main editor, whenever I need to just quickly write a small manifest to "document" some stuff, I return to `VIM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)>`_.

By customization puppet syntax is supported and the `Puppetlabs Styleguide <http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/style_guide.html>`_ implemented as well.

I just wanted to have a quick look into this topic and get VIM basically supporting the syntax and aligning the code for me. During this I also learned about `pathogen.vim <https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen>`_ for managing those extension and quickly install other stuff as well. So this is covered here as well.

Pathogen
--------
`Pathogen <https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen>`_ takes over the handling of the variable 'runtimepath' in VIM. VIM searches a couple of paths for scripts and stuff that are defined in 'runtimepath'. Adding more scripts/plugins requires to edit or extend this path as well. *Pathogen* does this automatically (More information `here <http://usevim.com/2012/12/28/vim-101-runtimepath/>`_.

Since the installation is described detailed enough `on the github project page <https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen>`_ I will only list the commands for the setup for my personal documentation purpose.

.. code:: bash

   # Installation of pathogen
   mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle && \
   curl -LSso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim https://tpo.pe/pathogen.vim
   # Including it into the VIM configuration
   echo 'execute pathogen#infect()' >> ~/.vimrc

Now any plugins you wish to install can be extracted to a sub-directory under  `~/.vim/bundle`, and they will be added to the  'runtimepath'.

Vim-Puppet
----------
Now with Pathogen.vim in place it is going very quick to install `vim-puppet <https://github.com/rodjek/vim-puppet>`_. This will give you syntax highlighting and formatting based on the puppetlabs styleguide.

.. code:: bash

   cd ~/.vim/bundle && \
   git clone git://github.com/rodjek/vim-puppet.git

Done.

Tabular
-------
Next step: automatic alignment of the tabs for the puppet manifests with `Tabular <https://github.com/godlygeek/tabular>`_ Again using pathogen.

.. code:: bash

   cd ~/.vim/bundle && \
   git clone git://github.com/godlygeek/tabular.git

Syntastic
---------
Hell, since I am installing stuff anyway, I will just continue. `Syntastic <https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic>`_ is a syntax checker for many different files and Puppet is just one of them. Just install it and it works:

.. code:: bash

   cd ~/.vim/bundle && \
   git clone https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic.git

Supported Checkers (the ones currently running) are listed in VIM with

.. code::

   :SyntasticInfo

The syntax check executes when saving the file, not during entering the code.