Reusing Puppet Providers

Last night I was thinking about writing scripts to manage services, packages etc in a heterogeneous environment. This is hard because the operating systems all behave differently.

This is of course a problem that Puppet solves with it’s providers system, after some chatting with Luke on IRC I now have a pretty nice solution.

Assuming you don’t mind shell scripting in Ruby here’s a pretty decent bit of Ruby to manage a service on many different environments.

require 'puppet'
 
service = ARGV.shift
action = ARGV.shift
 
ARGV.length > 0 ? hasstatus = true : hasstatus = false
 
begin
    svc = Puppet::Type.type(:service).new(:name => service, 
        :hasstatus => hasstatus).provider
 
    svc.send action
 
    puts("#{service} #{action} status: #{svc.status}")
rescue Exception => e
    puts("Could not #{action} service #{service}: #{e}")
end
require 'puppet' service = ARGV.shift action = ARGV.shift ARGV.length > 0 ? hasstatus = true : hasstatus = false begin svc = Puppet::Type.type(:service).new(:name => service, :hasstatus => hasstatus).provider svc.send action puts("#{service} #{action} status: #{svc.status}") rescue Exception => e puts("Could not #{action} service #{service}: #{e}") end

# service.rb httpd stop true
httpd stop status: stopped
 
# service.rb httpd start true
httpd start status: running
# service.rb httpd stop true httpd stop status: stopped # service.rb httpd start true httpd start status: running

You’d probably want to put in support for the pattern parameter to keep certain broken Operating Systems happy, but this is pretty nice and platform independent.

Reusing Puppet Providers

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