Puppet overwrites symlinked directory

Question

I am using Puppet to manage the configurations of some servers. One of the tasks is to create a specific folder structure under /www for hosting our applications.

But lately, we've had this server where /www is just a symbolic link to another directory (had to do that because of storage shortage)

$ ls -l /www
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Oct 25 15:33 /www -> /storage/www/

And we've been using this so far to manage directories:

file { $path:
ensure => directory,
owner  => user,
group  => group,
mode   => 'a=rx,u+w'
}

The issue with this specific server, is that when running Puppet, the /www symlink gets deleted and Puppet creates a new regular directory under /www instead. And that breaks the applications for us unless we intervene manually to create the symbolic link again.

My question: Does someone know of a way that makes Puppet not delete the symlink and just treat it as a directory: If no /www directory or no /www symlink exists, create the /www directory, else do nothing?

Answer 1

The short answer is to change

file { $path:
    ensure => directory,
    owner  => user,
    group  => group,
    mode   => 'a=rx,u+w'
}

into

file { $path:
    ensure => link,
    target => /path/to/original/directory
    owner  => user,
    group  => group,
    mode   => 'a=rx,u+w'
}

By using ensure => directory, you are telling puppet that you want a directory, and that anything else it finds (like a file or symbolic link) it should clobber and replace with the directory. By using ensure => link, you'll be telling puppet that you want a symbolic link that points to the value of target, which in turn could be a directory, a file, or a device. Depending on what you're doing, you may need to create a file type (using ensure => directory) on your target, if you need puppet to manage it.

I would strongly recommend you read the documentation for the file type to better understand how to use it.

Edit:

To distinguish between different servers, you'll want to use individual node definitions for your different servers. You could essentially do the following to get what you want:

node 'server1.mydomain.com' {
    file { $path:
        ensure => directory,
        owner  => user,
        group  => group,
        mode   => 'a=rx,u+w'
    }
}

node 'server2.mydomain.com' {
    file { $path:
        ensure => link,
        target => /path/to/original/directory
        owner  => user,
        group  => group,
        mode   => 'a=rx,u+w'
    }
}