Puppet, Overrides, and AOE

A nice little titbit I picked up in regards to Puppet, overrides, and Area of Effect (source):

You can define commands to be executed using exec { }. But, you can also override the defaults for the entire class by using the capitalized version of the command, Exec { }.

So, if you have ten instances of a command, you can override the defaults on all of them. This is super helpful when, say, defining the default PATH for all exec calls in your class.

This also extends to other classes. For example, Archive::Download { timeout => 300 } will allow you to extend the default timeout for all calls to archive::download, even if they are wrapped within other classes.

The mnemonic to remember this is the rubyism for constants, e.g. Class::Thing vs module::thing. At least I’m pretty sure it is. There’s still a lot of rubyisms in Puppet, even if they are changing the base language server side.

Update: as an aside, errors in a giant puppet apply can be found by grep (err) <filename>. Also, --detailed-exitcodes might be a helpful flag depending how complex your setup is.