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Accepted
Thilo
Asked: 2013-03-07 22:17:34 +0800 CST

How to create a user and a lot of her files with Puppet?

  • 772

I need to create a user account and a lot of files for that user with Puppet.

Works fine with the most straightforward approach, but on every file resource I have to specify owner => 'theuser', which seems horribly redundant (if I don't they end up root-owned).

Is there a way to have a scoped default for the owner? Or something like sudo where puppet runs under that user for a certain set of resources?

puppet

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    So if everything is in a single location you can use the recurse option for file

    file { "/path/to/files/":
    ensure  => directory,
    recurse => true,
    owner   => "user",
    group   => "group",
    mode    => "700",
    source  => "puppet:///modules/moduleName/path/in/files/",
  }

    Then just have all your files in like

    modules/ModuleName/path/in/files/

    Puppet will put all the files in that module path into /path/to/files on the system owned by that user/group.

    • 4

  2. To cut down on e.g. the owner attribute you can add some defaults.

    File {
  owner => 'user',
  group => 'somegroup',
  mode  => '0444'
}

file {
  '/some/where/file1': source => 'some-source1';
  '/some/where/file2': source => 'some-source2';
  '/some/where/file3': source => 'some-source3';
}

    Documentation on resource defaults: https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/latest/lang_defaults.html

    • 1