If you have a server that is already configured as it needs to be, or nearly so, you can capture that configuration as a Puppet manifest. The Puppet resource command generates Puppet manifests from the existing configuration of a system. For example, you can have puppet resource
generate a manifest that creates all the users found on the system. This is very useful to take a snapshot of a working system and get its configuration quickly into Puppet.
Here are some examples of using puppet resource
to get data from a running system:
To generate the manifest for a particular user, run the following command:
[root@cookbook ~]# puppet resource user thomas user { 'thomas': ensure => 'present', comment => 'thomas Admin User', gid => '1001', groups => ['bin', 'wheel'], home => '/home/thomas', password => '!!', password_max_age => '99999...