Provider development


Providers are back-ends that support specific implementations of a given resource type, particularly for different platforms. Not all resource types have or need providers, but any resource type concerned about portability will likely need them.

For instance, there are more than 20 package providers, including providers for package formats like dpkg and rpm along with high-level package managers like apt and yum. A provider’s main job is to wrap client-side tools, usually by just calling out to those tools with the right information.

The examples on this page use the apt and dpkg package providers, and the examples used are current as of 0.23.0.

Note: Unless you are maintaining existing type and provider code, or the Resource API limitations affect you, use the Resource API to create custom resource types, instead of this method.

Declaring providers

Providers are always associated with a single resource type, so they are created by calling the provide method on that resource type.

The provide method takes three arguments plus a block:
  • The first argument must be the name of the provider, as a :symbol.
  • The optional :parent argument should be the name of a parent class.
  • The optional :source argument should be a symbol.
  • The block takes no arguments, and implements the behavior of the provider.
There are several kinds of parent classes you can use:
Base provider
A provider can inherit from a base provider, which is never used alone and only exists for other providers to inherit from. Use the full name of the class. For example, all package providers have a common parent class:
Puppet::Type.type(:package).provide(:dpkg, :parent => Puppet::Provider::Package) do
  desc "..."
Note the call to the desc method; this sets the documentation for this provider, and should include everything necessary for someone to use this provider.
Another provider of the same resource type
Providers can also specify another provider as their parent. If it’s a provider for the same resource type, you can use the name of that provider as a symbol.
Puppet::Type.type(:package).provide(:apt, :parent => :dpkg, :source => :dpkg) do
Note that we’re also specifying that this provider uses the dpkg source; this tells Puppet to deduplicate packages from dpkg and apt, so the same package does not show up in an instance list from each provider type. Puppet defaults to creating a new source for each provider type, so you have to specify when a provider subclass shares a source with its parent class.
A provider of any resource type
Providers can also specify a provider of any resource type as their parent. Use the Puppet::Type.type(<NAME>).provider(<NAME>) methods to locate the provider.
# my_module/lib/puppet/provider/glance_api_config/ini_setting.rb
  # set ini_setting as the parent provider
  :parent => Puppet::Type.type(:ini_setting).provider(:ruby)
) do
  # implement section as the first part of the namevar
  def section
    resource[:name].split('/', 2).first
  def setting
    # implement setting as the second part of the namevar
    resource[:name].split('/', 2).last
  # hard code the file path (this allows purging)
  def self.file_path


The first question to ask about a new provider is where it will be functional, which Puppet calls suitable. Unsuitable providers cannot be used to do any work. The suitability test is late-binding, meaning that you can have a resource in your configuration that makes a provider suitable.

If you start puppetd or puppet in debug mode, you’ll see the results of failed provider suitability tests for the resource types you’re using.

Puppet providers include some helpful class-level methods you can use to both document and declare how to determine whether a given provider is suitable. The primary method is commands, which does two things for you: it declares that this provider requires the named binary, and it sets up class and instance methods with the name provided that call the specified binary. The binary can be fully qualified, in which case that specific path is required, or it can be unqualified, in which case Puppet finds the binary in the shell path and uses that. If the binary cannot be found, then the provider is considered unsuitable. For example, here is the header for the dpkg provider (as of 0.23.0):
commands :dpkg => "/usr/bin/dpkg"
commands :dpkg_deb => "/usr/bin/dpkg-deb"
commands :dpkgquery => "/usr/bin/dpkg-query"
In addition to looking for binaries, Puppet can compare Facter facts, test for the existence of a file, check for a feature such as a library, or test whether a given value is true or false. For file existence, truth, or false, call the confine class method with exists, true, or false as the name of the test and your test as the value:
confine :exists => "/etc/debian_release"
confine :true => /^10\.[0-4]/.match(product_version)
confine :false => (Puppet[:ldapuser] == "")
To test Facter values, use the name of the fact:
confine :operatingsystem => [:debian, :solaris]
confine :puppetversion => "0.23.0"
Case doesn’t matter in the tests, nor does it matter whether the values are strings or symbols. It also doesn’t matter whether you specify an array or a single value — Puppet does an OR on the list of values.
To test a feature, as defined in lib/puppet/feature/*.rb, supply the name of the feature. This is preferable to using a confine :true statement that calls Puppet.features because the expression is evaluated only one time. Puppet enables the provider if the feature becomes available during a run (for example, if a package is installed during the run).
confine :feature => :posix
confine :feature => :rrd
You can create custom features. They live in lib/puppet/feature/*.rb and an example can be found here. These features can be shipped in a similar manner as types and providers are shipped within modules and are pluginsynced.

Using custom features you can delay resource evaluation until the provider becomes suitable. This is a way of informing Puppet that your provider depends on a file being created by Puppet, or a certain fact being set to some value, or it not being set at all.

Default providers

Providers are generally meant to be hidden from the users, allowing them to focus on resource specification rather than implementation details, so Puppet does what it can to choose an appropriate default provider for each resource type.

This is generally done by a single provider declaring that it is the default for a given set of facts, using the defaultfor class method. For instance, this is the apt provider’s declaration:
defaultfor :operatingsystem => :debian
The same fact-matching functionality as confinement is used.
Alternatively, you can supply a regular expression (regex) value to match against a fact value. This is useful, for example, for providers that should only be default for a specific range of operating system versions:
defaultfor :operatingsystemmajrelease => /^[5-7]$/

How providers interact with resources

Providers do nothing on their own; all of their action is triggered through an associated resource (or, in special cases, from the transaction). Because of this, resource types are essentially free to define their own provider interface if necessary, and providers were initially developed without a clear resource-provider API (mostly because it wasn’t clear whether such an API was necessary or what it would look like). At this point, however, there is a default interface between the resource type and the provider.

This interface consists entirely of getter and setter methods. When the resource is retrieving its current state, it iterates across all of its properties and calls the getter method on the provider for that property. For instance, when a user resource is having its state retrieved and its uid and shell properties are being managed, then the resource calls uid and shell on the provider to figure out what the current state of each of those properties is. This method call is in the retrieve method in Puppet::Property.

When a resource is being modified, it calls the equivalent setter method for each property on the provider. Again using our user example, if the uid was in sync but the shell was not, then the resource would call shell=(value) with the new shell value.

The transaction is responsible for storing these returned values and deciding which value to send, and it does its work through a PropertyChange instance. It calls sync on each of the properties, which in turn call the setter by default.

You can override that interface as necessary for your resource type.

All providers must define an instances class method that returns a list of provider instances, one for each existing instance of that provider. For example, the dpkg provider should return a provider instance for every package in the dpkg database.

Provider methods

By default, you have to define all of your getter and setter methods. For simple cases, this is sufficient — you just implement the code that does the work for that property. For the more complicated aspects of provider implementation, Puppet has prefetching, resource methods, and flushing. 


First, Puppet transactions prefetch provider information by calling prefetch on each used provider type. This calls the instances method in turn, which returns a list of provider instances with the current resource state already retrieved and stored in a @property_hash instance variable. The prefetch method then tries to find any matching resources, and assigns the retrieved providers to found resources. This way you can get information on all of the resources you’re managing in just a few method calls, instead of having to call all of the getter methods for every property being managed. Note that it also means that providers are often getting replaced, so you cannot maintain state in a provider.

Resource methods

For providers that directly modify the system when a setter method is called, there’s no substitute for defining them manually. But for resources that get flushed to disk in one step, such as the ParsedFile providers, there is a mk_resource_methods class method that creates a getter and setter for each property on the resource. These methods retrieve and set the appropriate value in the @property_hash variable.


Many providers model files or parts of files, so it makes sense to save up all of the writes and do them in one run. Providers that need this functionality can define a flush instance method to do this. The transaction calls this method after all values are synced (which means that the provider should have them all in its @property_hash variable) but before refresh is called on the resource (if appropriate).

How helpful was this page?