Puppet: Multiple Classes & Inheritance

I learned about a very cool thing yesterday: Defined Types in Puppet. Previously, I was trying to use parameterized classes for code reusability, but the problem there is that you can only declare one class resource per node. So puppet would yell if you tried to use the same parameterized class more than once on the same node. That's where defined types come in, they let you essentially declare a constructor like you would for a class, but as a method signature. Then, you can declare as many as you want and give them names.

The tie in to how to use this with classes and inheritance is to run the Defined Type declaration within each of your individual classes.

Defined types are not auto-loaded in the same fashion as the rest of the modules, so it's necessary to define them in a file named "init.pp" Otherwise they won't load and you'll see lots of errors like, "err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: Puppet::Parser::AST::Resource failed with error ArgumentError: Invalid resource my_defined_resource at .../modules/module_name/manifests/my_manifest.pp:8 on node node.f.q.d.n"

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