From Imperative to Declarative System Configuration with Puppet
After my impromptu presentation about configuration management with Puppet at BarCampGR a few weeks ago, several people mentioned that they had tried to use Puppet before, but couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything in the first place.
I’d like to clear up some of that uncertainty if I can, so here is an example of the simplest thing that could possibly work. This is not an example of how best to organize your code or write expressively, but it will show how you might start transitioning from imperative to declarative thinking through the use of Puppet’s Exec resource type.