Puppet Cookbook - Third Edition

Managing users with virtual resources

Users are a great example of a resource that may need to be realized by multiple classes. Consider the following situation. To simplify administration of a large number of machines, you defined classes for two kinds of users: developers and sysadmins. All machines need to include sysadmins, but only some machines need developers:

node 'server' { 
  include user::sysadmins 
}

node 'webserver' {
  include user::sysadmins 
  include user::developers 
}

However, some users may be members of both groups. If each group simply declares its members as regular user resources, this will lead to a conflict when a node includes both developers and sysadmins, as in the webserver example.

To avoid this conflict, a common pattern is ...