Invalid metadata.json in module root causes Error 400

The other day I <a href="https://github.com/jefffield/puppet-cdh3">forked</a> a <a href="https://github.com/sergei-koren/puppet-Cloudera">module from github</a> that I had used a while back but had not been updated in some time.

Within their module is <a href="https://github.com/sergei-koren/puppet-Cloudera/blob/master/modules/ganglia/metadata.json">this file</a>:

{

  "name": "OSS-OSS",

  "author": "",

  "license": "",

  "version": "1.0.0",

  "types": [

  ],

  "checksums": "",

  "source": ""

}

At some point, for reasons I could not now tell you, I moved that file out of the ganglia module and into the <b>root of my cdh3 module</b>. Little did I know how much time it would waste later.

I went about reformatting the module quite a bit, and then finally got to testing the code, and consistently came up against this error:

Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: Could not find class cdh3 for server01.123xyz.com on node server01.123xyz.com

Warning: Not using cache on failed catalog

Error: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run

Various stages of madness set in as I tore things apart trying to find the problem. I stack traced, I debugged, I validated my code, I triple checked my naming.

So I decided to remove all files but those essential to the function of the module, and it started working. So I put the others back, started removing them one at a time, and discovered it was all caused by this presumably invalid, but structurally correct JSON file.

Obviously the error is mine (lesson learned), but shouldn't this fail in such a way it indicates that this is the cause? No where in my searching did I ever encounter that file in any log or debugging output.