Phil Taprogge's questions

We currently use puppet 3.8.7 to provision a large number of AWS EC2 instances.

Since these machines have small and slow root volumes, we symlink certain directories from e.g. /var to /mnt.

This leads to manifests riddles with segments like this:

group { 'postgres':
  ensure  => present,
  system  => true,
}

user { 'postgres':
  ensure  => present,
  comment => 'PostgreSQL administrator',
  gid     => 'postgres',
  home    => '/var/lib/postgresql',
  require => Group['postgres'],
}

file { '/mnt/postgresql':
  ensure  => directory,
  owner   => 'postgres',
  group   => 'postgres',
  mode    => '0755',
  require => User['postgres'],
}

file { '/var/lib/postgresql':
  ensure  => link,
  target  => '/mnt/postgresql',
  require => File['/mnt/postgresql'],
  before  => Class['dbserver'],
}

This is

1. ugly

2. overly verbose

   and

3. error prone if an implicit dependency (e.g. on postgresql-client) creates the directory before the file statement is evaluated.

So I'm wondering, how do other people tackle this?

Is there a better way to ensure that

• such symlinks always get created before the package containing the directory gets installed

but

• they only get created if a package containing the directory is going to be installed?