Linux – Puppet “file” resource emptied a directory

filesystemslinuxpuppet

I'm in the somewhat embarrassing position of having unintentionally deleted multiple TB of important data via Puppet, and I'm just trying to understand why this might have happened.

Firstly, I'm pretty sure the reason it's gone (as in unrecoverable except via backups) is:

File { backup => false }

in my site.pp. The nodes were set up to hard mount something via NFS, so a mount point /mount, and a line in fstab like this:

nfsserver:/mount   /mount  nfs   <options> 0 0

I wanted to get rid of the mount, and replace it with a symlink to the same eventual location (though a different path).

My puppet manifest looked like this:

class symlinks::linkdirtest ( ) { 
        file { '/mount':
            ensure => "link",
            target => "/anotherdir/mount",
        }
        mount { "/mount":
            ensure => "absent",
        }
}

This yielded the following when doing a puppet run:

notice: /Stage[main]/Symlinks::Linkdirtest/File[/mount]: Not removing directory; use 'force' to override

So, I duly (or stupidly) added:

class symlinks::linkdirtest ( ) { 
        file { '/mount':
            ensure => "link",
            target => "/anotherdir/mount",
                    force => "true",
        }
....

And lo and behold, puppet proceeded to consign the contents of the all-important mount to oblivion, while the mount point itself remained.

Any idea why this might have happened?

Thanks

Best Answer

It replaced that directory with a link: Documentation

Under 'force':

"Replace directories with files or links"

For future reference, you can try running in noop mode to see what changes will be made:

puppet agent --test --debug --noop --show-diff
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