Puppet not recieving hiera data

Question

I'm trying to use hiera and puppet together. I've added hiera_proxy yaml file in hiera hierarchy and am using it as the default hiera source file. For some reason, I'm not getting the hiera data value and it shows up this error.

Where, hiera_proxy is the new environment created

hierafile 1 /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/hiera_proxy/hiera.yaml

version: 5
defaults:
  # The default value for "datadir" is "data" under the same directory as the hiera.yaml
  # file (this file)
  # When specifying a datadir, make sure the directory exists.
  # See https://docs.puppet.com/puppet/latest/environments.html for further details on environments.
  # datadir: data
  # data_hash: yaml_data


hierarchy:
  - name: "environment specific yaml"
    path: "hiera_proxy.yaml"
  - name: "Per-node data (yaml version)"
    path: "nodes/%{::trusted.certname}.yaml"
  - name: "Other YAML hierarchy levels"
    paths:
      - "common.yaml"

This is the hiera_proxy.yaml hiera data source file

This is the yaml hiera source named as hiera_proxy.yaml as in herarchy/etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/hiera_proxy/data/hiera-proxy.yaml

---
profiles::apache::servername: "taraserver.com"
profiles::apache::port: "80"
profiles::apache::docroot: "/var/www/tarahost"

hiera lookup in profile

$servername  = hiera('profiles::apache::servername',{})
  $port        = hiera('profiles::apache::port',{})
  $docroot     = hiera('profiles::apache::docroot',{})
  class profile::apache{
    #configure apache
    include apache
    apache::vhost{$servername:
      port    => $port,
      docroot => $docroot,
    }
  }

#ERROR:

---

Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
Info: Retrieving plugin
Info: Loading facts
Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 500 on SERVER: {"message":"Server Error: Evaluation Error: Error while evaluating a Resource Statement, Apache::Vhost[7fba80ae621c.domain.name]: parameter 'docroot' expects a value of type Boolean or String, got Undef at /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/hiera_proxy/modules/profile/manifests/apache.pp:29 on node 94707b03ff05.domain.name","issue_kind":"RUNTIME_ERROR"}
Warning: Not using cache on failed catalog
Error: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run

Answer 1

Puppet does not consider the variables defined outside of the class. You need to define them inside the class.

your profile class should look something like this:

class profiles::apache (
  String $servername,
  Integer $port,
  String $docroot,
) {
  include apache
  apache::vhost { $servername:
    port    => $port,
    docroot => $docroot,
  }
}

I've used automatic parameter lookup to set up variables, instead of calling hiera function