Puppet Types and Providers

Chapter 1. Puppet Resources

Resources are the fundamental building blocks used to model system state in Puppet. They describe the desired end state of unique elements managed by Puppet on the system. Everything that Puppet manages is expressed as a resource. In fact, every interaction between Puppet and the underlying system is expressed as a resource, too. This chapter covers the fundamental concepts behind resources, and lays out the structure of Puppet’s Resource Model for types and providers, setting you up to dive into both in the later chapters.

Installing Puppet

Given that this book is aimed at existing Puppet users, we assume you already have it installed. However, if you don’t, check out Appendix A, and then jump back here to get started.

Resources describe the desired end state of system components by specifying a type, a title, and a list of attributes.

Type

The type of a resource determines the system component Puppet manages. Some common types are: user, group, file, service and package. A resource declaration always contains the type of resource being managed.

Title

The title of a resource identifies an instance of that resource type. The combination of type and title refers to a single unique element managed by puppet, such as a user name joe or a file with path /root/.bashrc.

Attributes

Each resource supports a list of key value pairs called attributes. These attributes provide a detailed description that Puppet uses to manage the resource. For example, the file ...