Hello, Puppet – your first Puppet manifest

The first example program in any programming language, by tradition, prints hello, world. Although we can do that easily in Puppet, let's do something a little more ambitious, and have Puppet create a file on the server containing that text.

On your Vagrant box, run the following commands:

   cat /vagrant/examples/file_hello.pp

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

Tip

If you're not using the Vagrant box, copy the file examples/file_hello.pp from the puppet-beginners-guide Git repo to the server you're using to try out Puppet.

Now apply it with the following command:

   sudo puppet apply /vagrant/examples/file_hello.pp

Notice: Compiled catalog for localhost in environment production in 0.07 seconds
Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/File[/tmp/hello.txt]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}22c3683b094136c3398391ae71b20f04'
Notice: Applied catalog in 0.01 seconds

Tip

If...