Puppet service resource in Loop

The Puppet service resource actually only has three configurable components. These are:

*Service name

*Ensure

*Enable

A simple manifest would look like this:

This manifest is saying you want Puppet to ensure the netlogon service is running and enabled when you apply the configuration on a node.

Starting and stopping services is extremely simple and is only needed with the ensure parameter. Simply changing ensure to stopped will stop the service:

Another great use of the service resource is to enable or disable a service. If you want complete control over a system, it may be necessary to do this for every service on a system. Here, I change enable to false which means the service is disabled on the target node that runs this manifest.

In this manifest example, I want to ensure that multiple services are running when I apply them on my nodes. There are a few ways you can do this. First, you can just list the service resource for each service like the examples I have given prior. Alternatively, you could create an array in Puppet that stores all the services you want to manage:

When this configuration applies on a node using a puppet agent, it will cycle through each service in the $service_name variable to ensure it is running. If it is not running, it starts the service.