Templates are used to specify the contents of files. When we have a file to be created and its content needs to be created dynamically, we use templates. Templates are written in the ERB templating language. ERB is supported by Ruby. You can refer to http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.8.7/libdoc/erb/rdoc/ERB.html for more information. To use a template, we need to create a folder named templates under the relevant module. In the templates folder, we can use any file name with the .erb extension.

We will start with a simple file creation example. As you will remember, our first module was the helloworld module and we created a file in the hosts from static content. Now let's go back to this and add some dynamic content.

To refresh our memory, here are the details of the helloworld module. The manifest details are as follows:

As we can see, it is now creating a file and a directory. The file is created from the static content. Here is the module structure:

We will create a new templates...