Puppet Server includes a file server for transferring static file content to agents; this is what’s used whenever a file
resource has a source => puppet:///...
attribute specified.
Generally, files are stored in modules. But if you need to serve larger files that shouldn’t be in source control or shouldn’t be distributed with a module, you can make a custom file server mount point and let Puppet serve those files from another directory.
Summary
To create a new mount point, you must:
- Choose a directory on disk for the mount point. Make sure Puppet Server can access it, and put files in it as needed.
- Edit
fileserver.conf
on your Puppet Server node, so Puppet knows which directory to associate with the new mount point. - If you want to restrict which nodes can access this mount point, edit
auth.conf
.
Once the mount point is working, you can reference its files like puppet:///<MOUNT POINT>/<PATH>
.
What’s a mount point, in a Puppet URI?
Puppet URIs are constructed like this:
puppet://<SERVER>/<MOUNT POINT>/<PATH>
<SERVER>
is optional, which is why you usually seepuppet:///
URIs with three slashes. There’s little reason to specify a server, since the default is almost always what you want. (It’s the value of theserver
setting in Puppet agent, and a special mock server with amodules
mount point in Puppet apply.)<MOUNT POINT>
is a unique identifier for some collection of files. There are basically three kinds:- Custom mount points correspond to an arbitrary directory. The rest of this page is about these.
- The special
modules
mount point serves files from thefiles
directory of every module. It behaves as if someone had copied thefiles
directory from every module into one big directory, renaming each of them with the name of their module. (So the files inapache/files/...
are available atpuppet:///modules/apache/...
, etc.) - The special
plugins
mount point serves files from thelib
directory of every module. It behaves as if someone had copied the contents of everylib
directory into one big directory, with no additional namespacing. Puppet agent uses this mount point when syncing plugins before a run, but there’s no reason to use it in afile
resource.
<PATH>
is the remainder of the path to the file, starting from the directory (or imaginary directory) that corresponds to the mount point.
Creating a new mount point in fileserver.conf
fileserver.conf
uses an INI-like syntax. The fileserver.conf
page has a complete description, but all you need to know is:
[<NAME OF MOUNT POINT>]
path <PATH TO DIRECTORY>
allow *
[installer_files]
path /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/installer_files
allow *
In the example above, a file at /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/installer_files/oracle.pkg
would be available in manifests as puppet:///installer_files/oracle.pkg
.
Make sure that the puppet
user can access that directory and its contents.
Always include the allow *
line, since the default behavior is to deny all access. If you need to control access to a custom mount point, do so in auth.conf
. Putting authorization rules in fileserver.conf
is deprecated. (This deprecation targets Puppet 5.0; authorization rules in fileserver.conf
still work in Puppet 4.x.)
Controlling access to a custom mount point in auth.conf
By default, any node with a valid certificate can access the files in your new mount point — if it can fetch a catalog, it can fetch files; if it can’t, it can’t. This is the same behavior as the special modules
and plugins
mount points.
If necessary, you can restrict access to a custom mount point in auth.conf
.
Legacy auth.conf
You’ll be adding a stanza to /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/auth.conf
.
Your new auth rule must meet the following requirements:
- It matches requests to all four of these prefixes:
/puppet/v3/file_metadata/<MOUNT POINT>
/puppet/v3/file_metadatas/<MOUNT POINT>
/puppet/v3/file_content/<MOUNT POINT>
/puppet/v3/file_contents/<MOUNT POINT>
- It is located earlier in the
auth.conf
file than the default/puppet/v3/file
rule.
For example:
# Allow limited access to files in /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/installer_files:
path ~ ^/file_(metadata|content)s?/installer_files/
auth yes
allow *.dev.example.com
allow_ip 192.168.100.0/24