Validating what will be served

Before answers composed, an admin wrote a complete document and validated it:

$ proxmox-auto-install-assistant validate-answer answer.toml

Once an answer is assembled from a group chain plus a machine document plus a template fill, the document the installer receives is one nobody has ever seen — and a bad merge surfaces as a failed unattended install at 3am. Two subcommands exist to close that gap, and any change to merging has to keep them working.

render — what this machine would get

$ rescriptum render 98:fa:9b:50:d8:10                              # by identity
$ rescriptum render --query "serial=7ABC123&mac=98:fa:9b:50:d8:10" # by label
$ rescriptum render --query "path=/rhel/ks&serial=7ABC123"         # including the endpoint
$ rescriptum render --body captured-request.json                   # a real captured body

It resolves exactly as the server does — same matching, same layering, same template fill — and prints the result. The document goes to stdout; the line explaining how it was reached goes to stderr:

$ rescriptum render 98:fa:9b:50:d8:10
# format=toml machine=98-fa-9b-50-d8-10 group=rack-a
[global]
…

so redirecting gives you just the document:

$ rescriptum render 98:fa:9b:50:d8:10 > /tmp/answer.toml

Add path=… to --query when you want to check what a particular endpoint would answer — without it, resolution is unconstrained by format and may pick a document the real URL would have excluded.

Exit status is 0 when something resolved, non-zero when nothing applied (the server would have returned 404) or when rendering failed.

check — render everything, report what breaks

$ rescriptum check
checking files:examples
  10 group(s), 8 machine document(s)
  group "rhel-compute" selects on serial=7ABC*
    (verify with: rescriptum render --query "...")
  group "ubuntu-web" selects on file=user-data product=PowerEdge R6*
    (verify with: rescriptum render --query "...")
  1 answer(s) validated by their installer's own tool
  note: no schema validator exists for preseed answers
  note: toml answers not schema-checked — proxmox-auto-install-assistant is not on PATH
  ok — everything renders

Well-formed and merging cleanly is not the same as valid for an
installer. Where a validator exists and is installed it was used above;
install proxmox-auto-install-assistant, xmllint or ksvalidator for the rest.

What it does:

• Reports load-time problems — a group extending one that does not exist, a cycle between groups, a document that will not parse.
• Renders every machine document, and every member of every group. That is what actually exercises the merge.
• Names the groups that select on a match block and says it could not try them, rather than implying they were verified — a selector needs a real request.
• Flags a group with neither members nor match as reachable only via extends, in case that was not the intention.
• Calls the installer’s own validator where one exists and is on PATH, and says which formats it could not check.

Exit status is 0 when everything renders, 1 when anything failed — so it drops straight into CI.

The validators it knows

A missing tool is reported once as a note, never treated as a failure. A checker that refuses to run without optional tooling is a checker nobody runs.

check is not a schema checker itself: it proves your documents are well-formed and merge cleanly. For anything it cannot call a validator for, pipe a rendered answer in yourself:

$ rescriptum render 98:fa:9b:50:d8:10 > /tmp/answer.toml
$ proxmox-auto-install-assistant validate-answer /tmp/answer.toml

What check cannot prove

check renders each machine from its identity alone. It has no request, so it cannot supply facts that only arrive with one — a serial from a POSTed body, a mac from a query string. A template needing those is reported as a problem:

FAIL group "rack-a" member "98fa9b50d811": template needs {{ serial }}, but this request carries no "serial"

That is accurate — check genuinely cannot prove that answer renders — but it means a set that deliberately templates on request facts will not come back clean. Verify those with render --query and representative facts. See templating.

In CI

If your answers live in git, this is worth a job of its own:

# .github/workflows/answers.yml
name: answers
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Get rescriptum
        run: |
          curl -fsSL https://github.com/z29k/rescriptum/releases/latest/download/rescriptum-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz \
            | tar xz --strip-components=1
      - run: RESCRIPTUM_ANSWERS_DIR=answers ./rescriptum check

Add proxmox-auto-install-assistant to the runner and the same job schema-checks the TOML too.

Before deploying

deploy.sh runs check before it ships anything, and refuses to deploy if the answers do not come back clean. Serving a broken answer set is worse than not deploying.