Puppet is always about abstraction. But please never forget maintainability, readability and simplicity (K.I.S.S).

Nowadays we often see code like the following:

class my_great_thing (
  $data = {},
){
  $default = {
    ensure   => present,
  }
  create_resources('user', $data, $default)
}

Great abstraction, but what happens really?

When declaring the class my_great_thing, puppet compiler will automatically do a hier alookup for the key my_great_thing::data.

Maybe the key-value looks like this:

my_great_thing::data:
  'foo':
    home: '/home/foo'
    shell: '/bin/bash'
    uid: '1044'
    gid: '1044'
  'bar':
    home: '/home/bar'
    shell: '/bin/bash'
    uid: '1045'
    gid: '1045'

These data are not used with the create_resource function, which will generate two user resource types for the users foo and bar.

This is a quite hidden approach of what is done.

How about using Puppet 4 capability of dealing with data?

class my_great_class (
  Hash $data = {}
){
  $data.each |String $key, Hash $value| {
    $ensure = pick($value['ensure'], 'present')
    user { $key:
      ensure   => $ensure,
      *        => $value,
    }
  }
}

The most beautiful thing here is the splat operator * => $value,. This expands the $value subhash. Each key becomes the parameter and the according value becomes the parameter value.

Martin Alfke