Sourcing Puppet files from outside of modules

Question

I'm installing a package from a module (Nginx in this specific case) and would like to include a configuration file from outside of the module, i.e. from a top level files directory parallel to the top level manifests directory. I don't see any way to source the file though without including it in a module or in my current Vagrant environment referring to the absolute local path.

Does Puppet allow for sourcing files from outside of modules as described in the documentation?

Answer 1

if I understand your question correctly, you can. In your module a simple code like this

file { '/path/to/file':
    ensure => present,
    source => [
               "puppet:///files/${fqdn}/path/to/file",
               "puppet:///files/${hostgroup}/path/to/file",
               "puppet:///files/${domain}/path/to/file",
               "puppet:///files/global/path/to/file",
    ],
}

will do the job. The /path/to/file will be sourced using a file located in the "files" Puppet share. (in the example above, it search in 4 different locations).

update maybe you're talking about a directory to store files which is not shared by Puppet fileserver (look at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/file_serving.html), and in this case you can't i think, Vagrant or not, but you can add it to your Puppet fileserver to do it. I thinks it's the best (and maybe only) way to do it.