Resources, types, and providers
Resources are the fundamental basic unit of the Puppet language; every stateful item we wish to describe is a resource. Resources must be unique in terms of what they manage since Puppet has no way of managing or prioritizing conflict between resources. It will simply call out that a clash exists and fail to compile a catalog.
Each resource will have a type, which is a description of what we are configuring, such as a file or a registry setting; parameters, which are variables containing the settings we can customize for the resource; and a provider, which is the underlying implementation allowing Puppet to be OS independent. This provider is often a default based on the OS but can be added as an attribute if required. So, a resource declaration has the following syntax:
- Opens with the type name, such as
file, with no quotes and in lowercase - A curly brace (
{) - The title of the resource in quotes
- A colon (
:) - A list of attribute...
