Sourcing Puppet files from outside of modules - puppet

Question

I'm installing a package from a module (Nginx in this specific case) and would like to include a configuration file from outside of the module, i.e. from a top level files directory parallel to the top level manifests directory. I don't see any way to source the file though without including it in a module or in my current Vagrant environment referring to the absolute local path.
Does Puppet allow for sourcing files from outside of modules as described in the documentation?

Answer 1

if I understand your question correctly, you can.
In your module a simple code like this
file { '/path/to/file':
ensure => present,
source => [
"puppet:///files/${fqdn}/path/to/file",
"puppet:///files/${hostgroup}/path/to/file",
"puppet:///files/${domain}/path/to/file",
"puppet:///files/global/path/to/file",
],
}
will do the job. The /path/to/file will be sourced using a file located in the "files" Puppet share.
(in the example above, it search in 4 different locations).
update maybe you're talking about a directory to store files which is not shared by Puppet fileserver (look at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/file_serving.html), and in this case you can't i think, Vagrant or not, but you can add it to your Puppet fileserver to do it. I thinks it's the best (and maybe only) way to do it.

Answer 2

If you have a number of Vagrant VMs you can simply store files within your Vagrant project directory (containing your VagrantFile).
This directory is usually available to all VMs as /vagrant within the VM on creation.
If you want other directories on your computer to be available to your VMs just add the following to your VagrantFile
# see http://docs.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/config/vm/share_folder.html
config.vm.share_folder "v-packages", "/vagrant_packages", "../../dpkg"
Then to use the files within puppet you can simply treat them as local files to the VM
# bad example, bub basically use 'source => 'file:///vagrant/foo/bar'
file { '/opt/cassandra':
ensure => directory,
replace => true,
purge => true,
recurse => true,
source => 'file:///vagrant/conf/dist/apache-cassandra-1.2.0',
}
This is probably only wise to do if you only using local puppet manifests/modules.

Answer 3

Probably too late to help bennylope, but for others who happen across this question, as I did before figuring it out for myself ...
Include stuff like this in your Vagrantfile ...
GUEST_PROVISIONER_CONFDIR = "/example/destination/path"
HOST_PROVISIONER_CONFDIR = "/example/source/path"
config.vm.synced_folder HOST_PROVISIONER_CONFIDIR, GUEST_PROVISIONER_CONFDIR
puppet.options = "--fileserverconfig='#{GUEST_PROVISIONER_CONFDIR}/fileserver.conf'"
Then make sure /example/source/path contains the referenced fileserver.conf file. It should look something like ...
[foo]
path /example/destination/path
allow *
Now, assuming example-file.txt exists in /example/source/path, the following will work in your manifests:
source => "puppet:///foo/example-file.txt",
See:
Puppet configuration reference entry for fileserverconfig
Serving Files From Custom Mount Points