Puppet: Mastering Infrastructure Automation

Modules

Modules are self-contained, distributable, and (ideally) reusable recipes to manage specific applications or system's elements.

They are basically just a directory with a predefined and standard structure that enforces configuration over naming conventions for the managed provided classes, extensions, and files.

The $modulepath configuration entry defines where modules are searched; this can be a list of colon separated directories.

Paths of a module and auto loading

Modules have a standard structure, for example, for a MySQL module the code reads thus:

mysql/ # Main module directory mysql/manifests/ # Manifests directory. Puppet code here. mysql/lib/ # Plugins directory. Ruby code here mysql/templates/ # ERB Templates directory mysql/files/ ...