Puppet separates the implementation of a type into the type definition and any one of the many providers for that type. For instance, the package type in Puppet has multiple providers depending on the platform in use (apt, yum, rpm, gem, and others). Early on in Puppet development there were only a few core types defined. Since then, the core types have expanded to the point where anything that I feel should be a type is already defined by core Puppet. The modules presented in Chapter 5, Custom Facts and Modules, created their own types using this mechanism. The LVM module created a type for defining logical volumes, and the concat
module created types for defining file fragments. The firewall
module created a type for defining firewall rules. Each of these types represents something on the system with the following properties:
Unique
Searchable
Atomic
Destroyable
Creatable
When creating a new type, you have to make sure your new type has these properties. The resource defined...