Since the end result of a template is a file, you won't be surprised that we use Puppet's file resource to work with templates. In fact, we use an attribute of the file resource that you've seen before: the content attribute.
Recall from
Chapter 2, Creating your first manifests, that you can use the content attribute to set a file's contents to a literal string:
file { '/tmp/hello.txt':
content => "hello, world\n",
}And, of course, you can interpolate the value of Puppet expressions into that string:
file { "/usr/local/bin/${task}":
content => "echo I am ${task}\n",
mode => '0755',
}So far, so familiar, but we can take one further step and replace the literal string with a call to the epp() function (file_epp.pp):
file { '/usr/local/bin/backup':
content => epp('/examples/backup.sh.epp',
{
'data_dir' => '/examples',
}
),
mode => '0755',
}Puppet will compile the template file referenced...