Ways to simplify configs?

[Jonathan Gazeley]

On 27/07/17 12:46, Alan DeKok wrote:
>> Try putting that in puppet, to push out to several servers.  I'm willing to keep the full tree on my puppet server for editing, but setting that up for deployment is insane.
>    Puppet can't push out subdirectories, recursively?  That seems more of a flaw in puppet than anything else.  Unix systems have had subdirectories since 1975 or so...
>

Puppet *can* push out subdirectories, recursively. However it's not 
recommended to do it that way. Puppet's strength is modelling everything 
as a resource that can be manipulated in order to generate configs, 
rather than directly storing the configs itself. Flat files don't really 
tie into this.

Hence I wrote my FreeRADIUS Puppet module which allows the user to 
define things in a native Puppet way, and the module then magically 
generates the config. It's not quite as flexible as editing the plain 
text files but it has enough flexibility for 95% of people's needs, and 
it still provides the option to feed in arbitrary plain text configs for 
the cases where the content can't be modelled in Puppet.

Cheers,
Jonathan