Ubuntu – apt-get does not remove initscript

As you already have it all set up, then the steps outlined in this blog post will probably be enough to get you going in the right direction.

Unfortunately, there's no good way to do this with the built-in resource types, just two not-so-good options.

The 'proper' way involves defining a package resource for all of the packages you want to get rid of:

package { 'apache2.2-common':
    ensure => purged,
}
package { 'apache2-utils':
    ensure => purged,
}
# etc ...

And the 'improper' but far more manageable way would be to set up an exec resource to run the autoremove for the dependant packages when the apache2 package is removed:

package { 'apache2':
    ensure => purged,
}
exec { 'autoremove':
    command => '/usr/bin/apt-get autoremove --purge -y',
    # We don't want this running every time the puppet agent runs, 
    # so we'll set it to only run when the apache2 purge actually happens.
    # Note that this would not run on your node that already has the
    # apache2 package removed, since it won't trigger any more changes
    # to the package.
    refreshonly => true,
    subscribe => Package['apache2'],
}

Given these two options, the second is definitely more appealing - it's nice to be able to stick to built-in types whenever possible, but it's just not practical when you're removing a package with a huge number of dependencies.