Files

We saw in Chapter 2, Creating your first manifests, that Puppet can manage files on a node using the file resource, and we looked at an example which sets the contents of a file to a particular string using the content attribute. Here it is again (file_hello.pp):

file { '/tmp/hello.txt':
  content => "hello, world\n",
}

The path attribute

We've seen that every Puppet resource has a title (a quoted string followed by a colon). In the file_hello example, the title of the file resource is '/tmp/hello.txt'. It's easy to guess that Puppet is going to use this value as the path of the created file. In fact, path is one of the attributes you can specify for a file, but if you don't specify it, Puppet will use the title of the resource as the value of path.

Managing whole files

While it's useful to be able to set the contents of a file to a short text string, most files we're likely to want to manage will be too large to include directly in our Puppet manifests. Ideally, we would put a copy...