How to only run apt-get update from puppet if it’s necessary. A small example on how you can make apt-get update only run if a) the machine rebooted and b) something changed in /etc/apt.

More Puppet Tips&Tricks in our new blog post: This time on Variable variables.

Sometimes you need to hack up some code to work around some network problems. Sometimes you’re not very proud of it, but you want to share your solution nonetheless. This is one of those ugly solutions…

Although it’s going to be easier in puppet 2.6, this helps you if you want to check if a certain value is present in a puppet array and perform actions based on that.

Puppet Tips&Tricks: How to test the regex you built for your regsubst invocation. In IRB.

Puppet Tips&Tricks: A ruby function to be used with puppet for converting boolean values to numerical values. Useful for nagios, for example.

Another blog post in our Puppet Tips&Tricks series: Creating a fact which contains the installed version of a package.

This is the second post in a our Puppet Tips & Tricks series. This week some tips on simple debugging puppet manifests or modules.