Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

Iterating over multiple items

It's one darned thing after another! Arrays are a powerful feature in Puppet; wherever you want to perform the same operation on a list of things, an array may able to help. You can create an array just by putting its contents in square brackets:

$lunch = [ "franks", "beans", "mustard" ]

How to do it…

Add the following code to your manifest:

$packages = [ "ruby1.8-dev",
              "ruby1.8",
              "ri1.8",
              "rdoc1.8",
              "irb1.8",
              "libreadline-ruby1.8",
              "libruby1.8",
              "libopenssl-ruby" ]

package { $packages: ensure => installed }

Run Puppet, and note that each package should now be installed.

How it works…

Where Puppet encounters an array as the name of a resource, it creates a resource for each element in the array. In the preceding example, ...