Generating manifests with puppet resource

If you have a server which is already configured as it needs to be, or nearly so, you can capture that configuration as a Puppet manifest. The puppet resource command generates Puppet manifests from the existing configuration of a system. For example, you can have puppet resource generate a manifest that creates all the users found on the system. This is very useful for taking a snapshot of a working system and getting its configuration quickly into Puppet.

How to do it…

Here are some examples of using puppet resource to get data from a running system:

1. To generate the manifest for a particular user, run the following command:

   ubuntu@cookbook:~/puppet$ puppet resource user ubuntu
   user { 'ubuntu':
     ensure  => 'present',
     comment => 'Ubuntu',
     gid     => '1000',
     groups  => ['adm', 'dialout', 'cdrom', 'floppy', 'audio', 'dip', 'video', 'plugdev', 'netdev', 'admin'],
     home    => '/home/ubuntu',
     shell   => '/bin/bash',
     uid    ...