Puppet is one of those things I like in principle but is too much of a PITA to s...

Goladus · on March 8, 2011

The original example is actually kind of bad and doesn't demonstrate puppet's abstraction facilities.

You can define a custom resource, for example "system_file" that provides a default "root:root, mask 444" permissions such that you just have to define a source and destination for every file, overriding the default permissions when you want.

define system_file($mode = 444, $owner = root, $group = root, $content = '', $source = '', $ensure = 'present') {

        file { $name:
                owner => $owner,
                group => $group,
                mode => $mode,
                ensure => $ensure
        }

        if $source != '' { File[$name] { source => $source } }
        if $content != '' { File[$name] { content => $content } }

 }

So in the article's example, it would look like this:

        system_file { "/etc/ntp.conf":
            source => "puppet:///ntpd/ntp.conf",
            require => Package["ntp"]
        }

Or even

        system_file { "/etc/ntp.conf":
            source => "$configfiles/ntpd/ntp.conf",
            require => Package["ntp"]
        }

Where $configfiles might be the puppet server or some other location. One of the things you get with puppet is access to any of the local host properties that can be discovered with facter, so you can dynamically configure something like a source file.

uggedal · on March 12, 2011

Or you could override the default file resource attributes in sites.pp:

  File {
    owner => root,
    group => root,
    mode => 644,
  }

Then you could override that again in individual file resources. If you need several file resources with the same attributes you can override them within the scope of a class:

  class postgresql {
    File {
      owner => "postgres",
      group => "postgres",
      mode => 640,
    }
  
    $pgsql_root = "/etc/postgresql/8.4/main"
    file { "$pgsql_root/postgresql.conf":
      content => template("postgresql/postgresql.conf.erb"),
      require => Package["postgresql"],
    }
  
    file { "$pgsql_root/pg_hba.conf":
      content => template("postgresql/pg_hba.conf.erb"),
      require => Package["postgresql"],
    }
  }

vacri · on March 8, 2011

"price of 6 lines of puppet code" = 90 characters

price of your example = 105 characters