Generating manifests with the Puppet resource command

If you have a server that 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 to take a snapshot of a working system and get 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:

   [root@cookbook ~]# puppet resource user thomas
   user { 'thomas':
     ensure           => 'present',
     comment          => 'thomas Admin User',
     gid              => '1001',
     groups           => ['bin', 'wheel'],
     home             => '/home/thomas...