For a masterless Puppet setup I use to configure my personal computers, I was in need of a way to cleanup all my inline file declarations. I had a lot of things like this:

file { '/home/frank/.profile':
  ensure => present,
  content => "PATH=$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/games:.
  CVSROOT=anoncvs@openbsd.cs.fau.de:/cvs
  HISTFILE=~/.sh_history
  PS1='\u@\h:\w\$ '
  export PATH HOME TERM CVSROOT HISTFILE PS1
  ",
}

This gets messy real fast, especially because of the needed newlines and crappy indentation. After reading the Puppet Type Reference I didn’t think I could use the source attribute of “file”. However, when using modules in combination with a masterless setup, it does work the same as a setup with Puppet master, as long as you pass --modulepath to the puppet apply command. The previous example is now written as:

file { '/home/frank/.profile':
  ensure => present,
  source => 'puppet:///modules/openbsd/dot.profile',
}

The actual file contents can be stored in modules/openbsd/files/dot.profile, just like when using a Puppet master. That’s a lot cleaner!