Currently, r10k does not perform dependency resolution. It’s on the roadmap, but not here yet (RK-3 tracks the effort). Until then, it’s up to you to determine the module dependencies. You can do this by visiting a module’s forge page, then clicking on dependencies, then clicking on each dependency’s forge page and clicking on dependencies until you reach the bottom. That’s pretty boring and a recipe for mistakes. Let’s look at how to automate this.

If you use puppet module install, it will install the module and all its dependencies for you. Give it a module and a new temporary directory, to ensure we don’t already have a dependency in our path, and you’ll end up with what you need.

In the past, I’ve shown how you can then use puppet module list and some search and replace patterns to convert to a Puppetfile, but it was all manual and it was scattered through the blog article. Here are some of the patterns you need, in vi format:

:%s/\s*[└┬├─]*\s/mod "/
:%s/ (v/", "/
:%s/)/"/
:%s/-/\//g

Vi is interactive, though, we can do better. Using the magic of sed, I generated a tool called generate-puppetfile that will install the specified modules in temp directories and use the module listing to build a Puppetfile for you.

I renamed the utility from depconvert to generate-puppetfile for clarity.

Download the utility (git clone https://github.com/rnelson0/puppet-generate-puppetfile.git). Run it and pass the names of modules you want to use. Currently there is no real error checking to be had, so if you enter an invalid name or no name, you won’t get what you want, but errors will be passed to the screen. I hope this helps!