Summary

We've explored Puppet's file resource in detail, covering file sources, ownership, permissions, directories, symbolic links, and file trees. We've learned how to manage packages by installing specific versions, or the latest version, and how to uninstall packages. We've covered Ruby gems, both in the system context and Puppet's internal context. Along the way, we met the very useful puppet-lint tool.

We have looked at service resources, including the hasstatus, pattern, hasrestart, restart, stop, and start attributes. We've learned how to create users and groups, manage home directories, shells, UIDs, and SSH authorized keys. We saw how to schedule, manage, and remove cron jobs.

Finally, we've learned all about the powerful exec resource, including how to run arbitrary commands, and how to run commands only under certain conditions, or only if a specific file is not present. We've seen how to use the refreshonly attribute to trigger an exec...