Learning Puppet 4

Chapter 6. Controlling Resource Processing

You can control how Puppet utilizes and acts upon resources with metaparameters. Metaparameters are common attributes that can be used with any resource, including both built-in and custom resource types. Metaparameters control how Puppet deals with the resource.

You can find all metaparameters documented at “Metaparameter Reference” on the Puppet docs site.

Adding Aliases

As previously mentioned, every resource in the Puppet manifest must refer to a unique resource. Each resource has one attribute (called namevar) that identifies the unique resource on the node. If the namevar attribute is not set, it defaults to the title as a value. You’ve already seen this in previous examples:

file { '/tmp/testfile.txt':
  ensure  => present,
  path    => '/tmp/testfile.txt',   # this was implicit in earlier example
  content => "holy cow!\n",
}

The namevar attribute uniquely identifies the resource manifestation (e.g., the file on disk in this example), therefore it differs for each resource. Refer to the “Resource Type Reference” on the Puppet docs site to find the namevar for a given resource.

To simplify references to resources, you can add an alias or “friendly name” to the resource name. This is an essential technique when the resource’s name or location on disk might change from one node to the other. There are two ways to create an alias.

Specifying an Alias by Title

The first way to provide an alias for a resource is to supply a different ...