Personal Configuration

One of the design choices of Boxen very early on was that we didn't want to dictate down to users "you can do this, but you can't do that". We do so as little as possible in the core, and we don't do it at all for per-user configurations.

How? The personal manifest.

What even is a personal manifest?

Personal manifests live in modules/people/manifests/<name>.pp, where <name> is your GitHub username.

The simplest personal manifest looks like this:

class people::wfarr {
  notify { 'hello world': }
}

Ah, the good old "Hello World". It's boring, but you can see there's really not much boilerplate involved. Let's try something real this time:

class people::wfarr {
  include boxen::development
}

So what does this do? It clones every repo in the Boxen org to ~/src/boxen/<repo>. How? Well, we can refer to the source code! If you're new to Puppet, or are unsure of what that class is doing, check out the intro to puppet we've put together.

Running different code on multiple machines

Puppet has conditionals and switching. Typically, the most reliable way to ensure some code runs on one machine but not others is to use the case statement on the hostname fact. Example:

case $::hostname {
  'scruffy': {
    notify { "I'm Scruffy. The Janitor.": }
  }

  'bender': {
    notify { "My full name is Bender Bending Rodriguez": }
  }

  default: {
    notify { "Wha?": }
  }
}

One thing to note here is that Puppet always requires a default path on a case statement. Default is equivalent to "anything that isn't matched above".