Determining Correct File Placement for Puppet

Some guides instruct the user to create a directory at /etc/puppet/manifests and to place .pp files in that directory. However, doing so results in a non-working puppet install since, by default, puppet has defined defaults.

The correct way is to determine the defaults and work with them. With Puppet installed, issue for instance:

puppet config print | grep manifest

and, at least on Debian, the output will be along the lines of:

default_manifest = ./manifests
disable_per_environment_manifest = false
genmanifest = false
manifest = /etc/puppet/code/environments/production/manifests
ordering = manifest

which means that .pp files should be placed in /etc/puppet/code/environments/production/manifests.

It is possible to edit /etc/puppet/puppet.conf and change the defaults, however doing so comes at the cost of maintainability as well as possible incompatibility with the distribution defaults.