Automatically check Puppet manifest syntax in vim

Question

I want vim to automatically run a syntax check whenever I save a Puppet manifest. The command for validating a manifest is

puppet parser validate FILE

and I can run the command on the file in the current buffer by setting makeprg for Puppet manifests and then running the configured make command:

autocmd FileType puppet set makeprg=puppet\ parser\ validate\ %
autocmd BufWritePost *.pp :silent make | redraw!

However, I only see the validation output when I tell vim to always display the quickfix window:

autocmd QuickFixCmdPost [^l]* nested copen

What I would like is to have the quickfix window displayed only if there are errors (and automatically closed if there are none):

autocmd QuickFixCmdPost [^l]* nested cwindow
autocmd QuickFixCmdPost l* nested lwindow

But with the latter settings, the quickfix window is never shown, even if the parser detects errors (verified by manually running the command).

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that the parser produces its output in a different format than what quickfix expects. The error coordinates in the parser output are at the end of the error message:

Error: Could not parse for environment production: Syntax error at 'foo' (file: /some/dir/file.pp, line: 42, column: 23)

whereas quickfix would expect them at the beginning of the message:

/some/dir/file.pp:42:23: Error: Could not parse for environment production: Syntax error at 'foo'

You should be able to mitigate the issue by re-arranging the error information with a script like this:

#!/bin/sh
puppet parser validate "$1" 2>&1 |
  sed -e 's/\(.*\) (file: \(.*\), line: \(.*\), column: \(.*\))$/\2:\3:\4: \1/'

and than calling that script as the make command in vim:

autocmd FileType puppet set makeprg=puppet_validate.sh\ %
autocmd BufWritePost *.pp :silent make | redraw!
autocmd QuickFixCmdPost [^l]* nested cwindow
autocmd QuickFixCmdPost l* nested lwindow

Note that the script location must be in the PATH, otherwise you have to specify the full path to the script in the autocmd statement.

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