Using community Puppet style

If other people need to read or maintain your manifests, or if you want to share code with the community, it's a good idea to follow the existing style conventions as closely as possible. These govern such aspects of your code as layout, spacing, quoting, alignment, and variable references, and the official puppetlabs recommendations on style are available at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/style_guide.html.

How to do it…

In this section, I'll show you a few of the more important examples and how to make sure that your code is style compliant.

Indentation

Indent your manifests using two spaces (not tabs), as follows:

service {'httpd':
  ensure  => running,
}

Quoting

Always quote your resource names, as follows:

package { 'exim4':

We cannot do this as follows though:

package { exim4:

Use single quotes for all strings, except when:

• The string contains variable references such as "${::fqdn}"
• The string contains character escape sequences such as "\n"

Consider the following code:

file { '/etc/motd':
  content => "Welcome to ${::fqdn}\n"
}

Puppet doesn't process variable references or escape sequences unless they're inside double quotes.

Always quote parameter values that are not reserved words in Puppet. For example, the following values are not reserved words:

name => 'Nucky Thompson',
mode => '0700',
owner => 'deploy',

However, these values are reserved words and therefore not quoted:

ensure => installed,
enable => true,
ensure => running,

False

There is only one thing in Puppet that is false, that is, the word false without any quotes. The string "false" evaluates to true and the string "true" also evaluates to true. Actually, everything besides the literal false evaluates to true (when treated as a Boolean):

if "false" {
  notify { 'True': }
}
if 'false' {
  notify { 'Also true': }
}
if false {
  notify { 'Not true': }
}

When this code is run through puppet apply, the first two notifies are triggered. The final notify is not triggered; it is the only one that evaluates to false.

Variables

Always include curly braces ({}) around variable names when referring to them in strings, for example, as follows:

source => "puppet:///modules/webserver/${brand}.conf",

Otherwise, Puppet's parser has to guess which characters should be a part of the variable name and which belong to the surrounding string. Curly braces make it explicit.

Parameters

Always end lines that declare parameters with a comma, even if it is the last parameter:

service { 'memcached':
  ensure => running,
  enable => true,
}

This is allowed by Puppet, and makes it easier if you want to add parameters later, or reorder the existing parameters.

When declaring a resource with a single parameter, make the declaration all on one line and with no trailing comma, as shown in the following snippet:

package { 'puppet': ensure => installed }

Where there is more than one parameter, give each parameter its own line:

package { 'rake':
  ensure   => installed,
  provider => gem,
  require  => Package['rubygems'],
}

To make the code easier to read, line up the parameter arrows in line with the longest parameter, as follows:

file { "/var/www/${app}/shared/config/rvmrc":
  owner   => 'deploy',
  group   => 'deploy',
  content => template('rails/rvmrc.erb'),
  require => File["/var/www/${app}/shared/config"],
}

The arrows should be aligned per resource, but not across the whole file, otherwise it can make it difficult for you to cut and paste code from one file to another.

Symlinks

When declaring file resources which are symlinks, use ensure => link and set the target attribute, as follows:

file { '/etc/php5/cli/php.ini':
  ensure => link,
  target => '/etc/php.ini',
}