Avoiding duplicate declaration in a loop?

[buoyant_puppy]

Excuse my newbieness, but I'm having a basic misunderstanding regarding loops.

Say I have: joesfriends = jack, sam, sally

I need to add each entry into a file - one per line.

$joesfriends.each | String $joesfriends| {    # loop

  file { "/etc/list_of_joes_friends":    

    line => "${joesfriends}"

  }

}

This fails on a duplicate declaration error....but how can there not be a duplicate, it's a loop? The examples in the docs avoid this particular situation by using the var in the filename, but that's not usually going to be an option.

[Bart-Jan Vrielink]

Hello,

They are duplicate resources because Puppet (on the server) parses the manifests and adds all resources found to a catalog that is sent to the client, which uses this catalog to update the configuration.

The catalog cannot have duplicate resources.

I know of 3 basic methods to alter the contents of a file with Puppet: augeas, file_line and concat. Augeas is quite powerful, and maybe not best suited for this specific task. file_line is part of the puppetlabs-stdlibs module you most likely already have installed and concat is in a separate puppetlabs-concat module.

Untested, but with file_line I would do something like this:

joesfriends = jack, sam, sally

$joesfriends.each | String $joesfriend | {

  file_line { $joesfriend:

    ensure => present,

    path   => '/etc/list_of_joes_friends',

    line    => 'whatever you want',

  }

}

This assumes the file /etc/list_of_joes_friends is already present.

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[jcbollinger]

You have it backwards.  If you're trying to declare a single resource then it's the (Puppet) loop that's not an option.

No resource can be declared more than once.  You can, however, declare distinct resources in various iterations of a loop -- for example, resources representing different parts of the same file -- or you can construct resource properties via an iterative process in a template or custom function.

It's not clear exactly what you mean to do because the File resource type does not have a "line" property.  If you mean to describe the complete contents of a single file then you are looking for a way to construct a value for the 'content' property of one File resource.  I'd recommend a template for that purpose.  Puppet 4 has two flavors to choose from, ERB and EPP, either one of which would support building the file content by iterating over the elements of an array.

John