functions.pp

Function definitions are created with the define keyword. Functions can go in any of the pp files in the manifests directory. I choose to keep them separate for accounting purposes. My current functions.pp only has two functions in it, and they are very simple. The first one is a redefinition of the file type with defaults for my installation.

define remotefile($owner = root, $group= root, $mode, $server = "server0.example.com", $cls="base", $backup = false, $recurse = false) {
	file {
	    $name:
            mode => $mode,
            owner => $owner,
            group => $group,
            backup => $backup,
            source => "puppet://$server/$cls/$name"
	}
}

The name of the function is remotefile, since we imported functions.pp in our site.pp, we can use remotefile in any other file we include from site.pp. The file type in puppet can have a remote location that is given in the source option. Our function defines a default location of puppet://server0.example.com/base/$name where name is the name of the file. We also set the owner and group to root by default. Without using this function, copying an /etc/resolv.conf file from our puppetmaster to a client would look like this:

file {"/etc/resolv.conf":
    mode => 644,
    owner => root,
    group => root,
    backup => false
    source => "puppet://server0.example.com/base/etc/resolv.conf"
}

Using the function we can slim this down to:

remotefile { "/etc/resolv.conf": mode=> 644 }

Next we will define our nodes and a default class for puppetmaster to apply to the nodes.