Summary

In this chapter, the use of templates in Puppet was examined. It showed Puppet’s two types of templates – EPP and ERB – which worked in similar ways, using a mix of plain text and tags surrounding code to allow for Puppet/Ruby to apply logic and variables and create more complex content when evaluated. It was warned that the level of complexity should be carefully considered before using templates instead of functions such as file_line, and controlling resources individually. Additionally, because of the lack of functions for a single line or setting control in files, templates had been overused, and heritage code should be examined carefully to ensure that a template was the correct level of complexity.

EPP was shown to be the recommended way of producing templates since it was in the Puppet language and easier to learn for a Puppet developer. It was also more secure since it could limit its scope with parameters, and similarly, more performant since...