DevOps: Puppet, Docker, and Kubernetes

Managing users' customization files

Users tend to customize their shell environments, terminal colors, aliases, and so forth. This is usually achieved by a number of dotfiles in their home directory, for example, .bash_profile or .vimrc.

You can use Puppet to synchronize and update each user's dotfiles across a number of machines by extending the virtual user setup we developed throughout this chapter. We'll start a new module, admin_user and use the file types, recurse attribute to copy files into each user's home directory.

How to do it...

Here's what you need to do:

1. Create the admin_user defined type (define admin_user) in the modules/admin_user/manifests/init.pp file as follows:

   define admin_user ($key, $keytype, $dotfiles = false) { $username ...