puppet: enable / disable recurse directories

Question

so i have a basic modification module which applies to all servers managed through hiera. One submodule is called "files" and puts the scripts to /usr/local/bin/ of each server. So it iterates through the files directory and copies corresponding files. This works fine if i add the module.

Now i want to make this module to be manageable over hiera via $enabled = true|false. The problem is, when setting the ensure => absent it deletes the bin dir and prints some errors messages that it cannot delete the files, apparently because the bin dir is already deleted. So what i want is to just delete the files and leave the bin dir itself.

Any ideas?

I stumbled upon this old bug which seems to describe the same issue which looks like have been patched.

• https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/3180
• https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/3835

UPDATE: The point is to not reference every file in the manifest. Thats why i want to use recurse.

    files/
    files/devvm
    files/devvm/script1.sh
    files/devvm/live.sh
    files/devvm-tpl.dev
    files/devvm-tpl.dev/testscript2.pl
    files/common
    files/common/change_hostname.sh
    files/srvDC221
    files/srvDC221/wurst

class basemodifications::files (
     $enabled = "true",
 ) {

    file { 'usrlocalbin':
      ensure => $enabled ? {
        "true" => present,
        "false" => absent,
      },
      recurse => true,
      ignore => "*~",
      purge => true,
      owner => root,
      group => root,
      path => "/usr/local/bin/",
      #force => true, #will delete the bin directory
      sourceselect => all,
      source => ["puppet:///modules/tebasemod/common", "puppet:///modules/tebasemod/${::tecluster}", "puppet:///modules/tebasemod/${::fqdn}",]
    }

}

err: /File[/usr/local/bin/wurst]/ensure: change from absent to file failed: Could not set 'file on ensure: No such file or directory - /usr/local/bin/wurst.puppettmp_6753

Answer 1

You want to ensure that a certain set of files are present or absent in the directory, right? You don't ever want Puppet to ever delete the directory itself and all its contents? Then you need to manage the resources individually rather than recursing. Somethign like

file { '/usr/local/bin':
  ensure => directory,
  owner => root,
  group => root,
}

$scripts = ['/usr/local/bin/script1.sh', '/usr/local/bin/live.sh']

file { $scripts:
      ensure => $enabled ? {
        "true" => file,
        "false" => absent,
      },
  owner => root,
  group => root,
  require => File['/usr/local/bin'],
}

Since you need the scripts to vary across hosts, you can set $scripts in hiera rather than the manifest.