Puppet Foreach / For Loop Workaround
Here is a quick workaround to effectively write a foreach loop in puppet. There isn’t a native foreach function that I’m aware of, however it is possible to obtain similar functionality by using a define statement.
Let’s create a simple example to loop over multiple users, and perform an action on each user. In this case we’ll print “Found user
$users = [ "user1", "user2" ] define print_users { $user = $name notify { "Found user $user":; } } print_users { $users:; } |
On the agent we should see output that looks like this:
notice: /Stage[main]/Test/Test::Print_users[user1]/Notify[Found user user1]/message: current_value absent, should be Found user user1 (noop) notice: Test::Print_users[user1]: Would have triggered 'refresh' from 1 events notice: /Stage[main]/Test/Test::Print_users[user2]/Notify[Found user user2]/message: current_value absent, should be Found user user2 (noop) notice: Test::Print_users[user2]: Would have triggered 'refresh' from 1 events notice: Class[Test]: Would have triggered 'refresh' from 2 events |
So, as you can see, this effectively allows us to loop through the elements in an array and perform actions in a way that is very similar to a foreach loop.
Thanks to https://blog.kumina.nl/tag/puppet-tips-and-tricks/ for documenting this tip.
