I’ve had quite a lot of contributions to my Puppet Concat module and after some testing by various people I’m ready to do a new release.

Thanks to Paul Elliot, Chad Netzer and David Schmitt for patches and assistance.

For background of what this is about please see my earlier post: Building files from fragments with Puppet

You can download the release here. Please pay special attention to the upgrade instructions below.

Changes in this release

• Several robustness improvements to the helper shell script.
• Removed all hard coded paths in the helper script to improve portability.
• We now use file{} to copy the combined file to its location. This means you can now change the ownership of a file by just changing the owner/group in concat{}.
• You can specify ensure => “/some/other/file” in concat::fragment to include the contents of another file in the fragment. Even files not managed by puppet.
• The code is now hosted on Github and we’ll accept patches there.

Upgrading

When upgrading to this version you need to take particular care. All the fragments are now owned by root, the shell script runs as root and we use file{} to copy the resulting file out.

This means you’ll see the diff of not just the fragments but also the final file when running puppetd –test but unfortunately it also means the first time you run puppet with the new code your Puppet will fire off all notifies that you have on your concat{} resources. You’ll also see a lot of changes to resources in the fragments directory on first run. This is normal and expected behavior.

So if say you’re using the concat to create my.cf and notify the service to restart automatically then simply upgrading this module will result in MySQL restarting. This is a one off notify that happens only the first time, from then on it will be as normal. So I’d suggest when upgrading to disable those notifies till this upgrade is running everywhere and then put it back.