Generating manifests with the Puppet resource command

If you have a server that is already configured as it needs to be, or nearly so, you can capture that configuration as a Puppet manifest. The puppet resource command generates Puppet manifests from the existing configuration of a system. For example, you can have puppet resource generate a manifest that creates all the users found on the system. This is very useful to take a snapshot of a working system and get its configuration quickly into Puppet.

How to do it...

Here are some examples of using puppet resource to get data from a running system:

1. To generate the manifest for a particular user, run the following command:

t@mylaptop $ puppet resource user thomas
user { ...