Seeing this in the wiki: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#i-want-to-manage-a-directory-and-purge-its-contents

Some user tried it, but required the dir to be purged before adding new files, asked why it did not work on irc, tested it myself, did not succeed either with puppetd 0.24.5 (works with puppetd 0.24.4) In the newer puppetd a resource that does not exist gives a failure (while before it was only like a warning) so if you require this further down your recipe then it fails completely.

An example:

puppetmaster version 0.24.5

puppetclient filesystem:¶

mkdir -p /root/dirtopurge/junkdir1¶

touch /root/dirtopurge/junkfile2¶

puppetmaster class:¶

class purgedir { file { “/root/dirtopurge”:

  owner   => root,
  group   => root,
  purge   => true,
  recurse => true,
  force   => true,
  source  => "puppet://puppet/files/root/empty", #empty does not exist on fileserver, just a dummy to make it purge

} file {“/root/newfile”:

  owner  => root,
  group  => root,
  mode   => 644,
  require => File["/root/dirtopurge"],
  source => "puppet://puppet/files/root/newfile" #newfile does exist on fileserver

} }

puppetclient 0.24.5 messages log:¶

Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: Starting catalog run Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge]) Failed to retrieve current state of resource: No specified source was found from puppet://puppet/files/root/empty Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge/junkdir1]/ensure) removed Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge/junkfile2]/ensure) removed Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/newfile]) Dependency file[/root/dirtopurge] has 1 failures Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/newfile]) Skipping because of failed dependencies Aug 10 17:05:16 puppetclient puppetd[3316]: Finished catalog run in 0.38 seconds

dirtopurge is empty but /root/newfile was not created

puppetclient 0.24.4 messages log:¶

Aug 10 17:06:50 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: Starting catalog run Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge]/ensure) No specified sources exist Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge]/ensure) No specified sources exist Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge]/source) No specified sources exist Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge]/checksum) checksum changed ‘{mtime}Sun Aug 10 17:05:16 +0200 2008’ to ‘{mtime}Sun Aug 10 17:06:46 +0200 2008’ Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge/junk1]/ensure) removed Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/dirtopurge/junkdir]/ensure) removed Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: (//Node[puppetclient.homenet.lan]/purgedir/File[/root/newfile]/ensure) created Aug 10 17:06:51 puppetclient puppetd[3918]: Finished catalog run in 0.71 seconds

dirtopurge is empty and /root/newfile is created