I haven’t written a blog post in a while because I’ve been bogged down in work and life and not had much time in the lab. To make sure I don’t get too out of practice, I’m going to try writing some shorter tips and tricks articles. Let me know what you think.

A few days ago, someone asked a great question on the puppet-users mailing list about the location of config files in the roles/profile pattern. It’s a good question, and we can go deeper because it assumes the location of config files outside of that pattern, too. I’m going to explain where I keep my config files, and templates, in the various types of modules. There’s no single correct answer here, this is just a framework for me.

To start, let’s describe the types of modules. Component modules describe a single application/technology/thing and are designed to be consumed by end users. This is pretty much anything on the forge, such as puppet/hiera to manage a Hiera implementation or puppetlabs/apache to manage apache, vhosts, etc. There’s also a sub-type of these modules, Private Components. The line here is blurry, but think component modules that are not designed to go on the forge. This could be a module for a company’s internal application, very similar to a traditional component module, or an cluster of custom facts. Pretty much anything that’s not a Component module, or our final type: Profile modules. This last type is the collection of classes that make up your role/profile pattern implementation. They’re often simply called profile, but maybe there is more than one module if you have a lot of business groups using the puppet system. They differ from both types of component modules in that they contain the business logic of your implementation and are where you compose the collection of component modules that you use. I wrote an article on what goes in a role or profile, too.

In Component modules, the relevant configuration files or templates for the component are collected. In an ssh module, you’d have the ssh_config and sshd_config data; a sudo module would have sudoers and a template for sudoers.d/ files. Private Component modules vary quite a bit in functionality, but I treat them like regular component modules. If the module is for custom facts, there’s no need to put files or templates in it. If it’s for an internal app, the configuration files are stored in that module.

Your Role/Profile modules are a little more complicated. If you have a component module for apache, you likely have a profile class for apache, perhaps profile::apache or profile::somegroup::apache. The component module probably has its own file or template, but it may accept alternative files and templates. In this case, I create a sub-directory with the module subclass name, such as files/apache or templates/apache,  and add the file(s) there, e.g. templates/apache/vhosts.erb.

This is a pretty simple layout. The only real difficulty is when you have a private component modules and a profile for that component: do you put the file/template with the profile or the component module? I tend to lean toward the private component modules first, but I’ve done both.

I hope this helps and I’d love to hear of any other layouts you’ve had success with!