creating symlinks with wildcards

[Edward Bailey]

To explain the background behind my question

We have a number of situations where it would be great if I could have puppet automatically maintain a symlink for a resource such as the Java JVM.

For example - we install the JDK in /usr/java so after the RPM  install, the path to the JVM is /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_16. In order to simplify application configuration, I like to make JAVA_HOME something generic like /usr/java/java. I do this by creating a symlink

 ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_16/ /usr/java/java

I would like to have puppet maintain the symlink so that when YUM updates the JVM, the symlink gets updated as well. I know I could do this in the RPM or using exec but that sounds like too much work:)

Just for fun I tried to setup a file type in puppet to create the symlink using a wildcard. I did not expect this to work given the need for shell expansion.

file { "/usr/java/java":
    ensure => "/usr/java/jdk1.*"
}

Is their another way to do this in the puppet framework? I can do this using exec, but I wanted to work from within puppet first.

Thanks for any ideas

Ed

[Nigel Kersten]

So if you write a fact that is your jdk path, you could then use it in
your manifests:

file { "/usr/java/java":
ensure => symlink,
replace => true
target => $jdk_path,
}

That would seem to be the simplest option.

--
Nigel Kersten
nig...@google.com
System Administrator
Google, Inc.

[Trevor Hemsley]

I think you picked a bad example :)

Java installs a symlink /usr/java/latest which points to (surprise!) the
latest version that is installed.

Or maybe this is a Java 1.6 thing in which case you might want to
accelerate your migration

--

Trevor Hemsley
Infrastructure Engineer
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[List Account]

I wish I could upgrade to 1.6. We just upgraded to the 1.5 jdk. The
rpms I have do not create a symlink.
Thanks!

Sent from my iPhone

On May 12, 2009, at 11:34 AM, Trevor Hemsley <trevor....@codefarm.com

[List Account]

That's a really good idea. Thanks for sharing.

Ed

Sent from my iPhone