A collection of task oriented solutions in Puppet

Topics

 

Create a group

Challenge

You want to create a group.

Solution

# minimum required.
group { "logusers":
    ensure => "present",
}

# create a group with a specific GID.
group { "stats":
    gid    => 2001, 
}

Explanation

Creating a new group via puppet only requires the resource to be named and that ‘ensure => “present”’ be specified. If you specify a GID then you can even skip the ensure, otherwise you must provide it; and the new groups GID will be chosen by your operating system.

If you specify a different GID on a group that already exists then puppet will change the GID in /etc/group but it will not change the ownership of any existing files and directories. To change permissions on files please see Setting basic file permissions - TODO

By default most Linux distributions will use the ‘groupadd’ provider, which doesn’t allow you to manage group members, so you’ll have to do it on the user resources instead.