Maintaining environments

Puppet doesn't organize things in modules exclusively. There is a higher-level unit called environment that groups and contains the modules. An environment mainly consists of:

• One or more site manifest files
• A modules directory
• An optional environment.conf configuration file

When the master compiles the manifest for a node, it uses exactly one environment for this task. As described in Chapter 2, The Master and Its Agents, it always starts in manifests/*.pp, which form the environment's site manifest. Before we take a look at how this works in practice, let's see an example environment directory:

/opt/puppetlabs/code/environments
  production
    environment.conf
    manifests
      site.pp
      nodes.pp
    modules
      my_app
      ntp

The environment.conf file can customize the environment. Normally, Puppet uses site.pp and the other files in the manifests directory. To make Puppet read all the pp files in another directory, set the manifest option...