Hi all! First note: Puppet definitely goes beyond what is written here. Also, I’m far from being a puppet specialist, and after posting about Ansible, I’m writing about puppet because it is my main tool.
While translating a Ansible playbook once used to setup a developer machine - if I can call it rewrite - I found myself often using the same patter: Using create_resources function + pure hashmaps. What a hell?
Well, while defining nodes you use puppet resources to install lots os packages and configure them. Eg.: Create postgres databases, install GVM packages, etc. Then the need “iterate every new package/database and install/create it”.
To be fair, puppet doesn’t seem to be iteration friend. After a couple of research I found create_resources as a good solution for situations you need to repeate the creation of resources. Below an example will help to clarify:
Ok. What is happening? My real intention is to create as many databases as needed in my host. Notice the pg_databases parameter passed to developer_role class. This contains a map of database name => $definition pairs. Where definition is actually a map containing the database owner and password.
Then, the create_resources will execute a developer_role::postgres::create_db resource for every key defined at $pg_databases, matching every inner map key to resource variable.
So, instead of iterating every database yourself, or hard coding every call to postgresql::server::db defined by puppetlabs/postgresql you wrap everything in a second resource defined by yourself.
Another good example is the creation of python virtual envs, plus the packages to install in it. These two definitions wraps puppet-python:
Yes, it sounded for me. I’m using it a lot for mostly everything that should be repeatedly defined at node level. If you are a puppet specialist, let me know your opinion.
Hope you can take advantage of this as it seems to be helping me a lot. Merry Christmas!