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I'd like to use template() to concatenate some files. I read this question, which is fine if you know exactly how many files you want to concat. What if I just have an array of input file names?

$files = ['mymod/a.erb', 'mymod/b.erb', 'mymod/c.erb']

file { "/var/foo/final":
  content => template ($files)  # <-- error, can't convert Array to String
}

I'd like to avoid having to write a parser function.

Community
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Coderer
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1 Answers1

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This is not possible at the moment. There was a Puppet issue submitted for it and a fix proposed but does not seem like there's any rush to implement it.

As a possible workaround, you could have one template include others:

<% @template_array.each do |val| -%>
<% scope.function_template(val) %>
<% end -%>

Forewarning, I have not tested this but I believe it should work.

Belmin Fernandez
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  • I will try it out and report back. I was going to ask if it's possible to "call" the puppet `template()` function from inside Proper Ruby. If so, you could actually skip the extra file and go straight for `inline_template('@arr.reduce ("") { |str, f| str + scope.function_template(f) }')` – Coderer Mar 30 '15 at 09:32
  • Oh, good idea. I tend to go with separating logic and presentation so I avoid `inline_template` but this is a use case that may be appropriate. – Belmin Fernandez Mar 30 '15 at 12:17
  • If your manifest does this a lot (e.g. in a `defined type` that is instantiated in large numbers), this will cause a measurable performance hit. Apart from some boiler plate, a custom function will really not be that much more code, but saves CPU. – Felix Frank Mar 30 '15 at 12:24
  • Thanks for the advice, @FelixFrank, I will keep it in mind. It's for a monitoring module, so I can keep "things to monitor" in partial config files and assign those on a per-host basis. The module should be instantiated once per host, so I think a performance hit should be acceptable. – Coderer Mar 30 '15 at 12:57