In the previous section, we created a new custom type named gitrepo and told Puppet that it takes two parameters, source and path. However, so far, we haven't told Puppet how to actually check out the repo, in other words, how to create a specific instance of this type. That's where the provider comes in.
We saw that a type will often have several possible providers. In our example, there is only one sensible way to instantiate a Git repo, so we'll only supply one provider: git. If you were to generalize this type to just repo, say it's not hard to imagine creating several different providers depending on the type of repo, for example, git, svn, cvs, and so on.
