The first module we'll explore is a swiss army knife of sorts. It started as a single module, but over time has become a series of modules. This is the augeasproviders module, originally by domcleal, but now maintained by herculesteam.

These modules use augeas to implement types and providers. Types and providers are the native Puppet interfaces for managing resources. They're written in Ruby and have considerably more power in how they manage the underlying resources compared to the built-in Puppet types they replace. They also add additional types for many other resources such as entries in the SSH configuration file, or management of the Apache web server configuration file.

Augeas is a configuration file editing tool. It parses configuration files into an internal tree and then allows you to use commands to manipulate that tree. Once changes are made, the file can then be written back out. This allows you to modify just part of a configuration...