Trouble locating templates in Puppet

Question

I can't get my Puppet manifest to find templates the way I'd expect so I thought someone might have a quick answer. I'm new to puppet so just trying to understand all the locations for everything and how to reference files properly. If I'm missing something painfully obvious I apologize.

This works:

file {
     $zabbix_agent_conf:
     owner => root,
     group => root,
     mode => 0644,
     content => template("/etc/puppet/templates/zabbix/files/zabbix_agent_conf.erb"),
     require => Package["zabbix-agent"];
}

This does not:

file {
     $zabbix_agent_conf:
     owner => root,
     group => root,
     mode => 0644,
     content => template("puppet:///templates/zabbix/zabbix_agent_conf.erb"),
     require => Package["zabbix-agent"];
}

My /etc/puppet/puppet.conf:

[main]
logdir=/var/log/puppet
vardir=/var/lib/puppet
ssldir=/var/lib/puppet/ssl
rundir=/var/run/puppet
factpath=$vardir/lib/facter
templatedir=/etc/puppet/templates
prerun_command=/etc/puppet/etckeeper-commit-pre
postrun_command=/etc/puppet/etckeeper-commit-post

[master]
# These are needed when the puppetmaster is run by passenger
# and can safely be removed if webrick is used.
ssl_client_header = SSL_CLIENT_S_DN
ssl_client_verify_header = SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY

Answer 1

You cannot use the puppet URI scheme in combination with the template function as of yet. According to the docs:

Note that the path to the template doesn’t use the same semantics as the path in a puppet:/// URL. Sorry about the inconsistency. (Source)

Furthermore:

(If a file cannot be located within any module, the template function will fall back to searching relative to the paths in Puppet’s templatedir. However, using this setting is no longer recommended.) (Source)

This means that in order to use the templatedir the template function expects a simple relative path:

template("zabbix/zabbix_agent_conf.erb")

It is not recommended to use the templatedir. There is a good reason for this. It is better to group files together under the common denominator of a module, otherwise things can get pretty messy pretty fast. Think of modules as a good way to group all puppet resources that belong to each other: manifests, files, templates, extensions and tests.

So I would recommend creating a zabbix module. Place your puppet code in a zabbix class within a init.pp in the manifest directory of your zabbix module. Then you can place your template in the templates directory of your zabbix module and you can reference it by:

template("zabbix/zabbix_agent_conf.erb")

Hope this helps. Good luck!