Specifying dependencies in rspec-puppet

Posted on 28 June 2012

This doesn’t seem to be specified anywhere in the rspec-puppet documentation, so I thought I’d leave it here for the moment. Suppose you have a puppet type which always depends on another:

define foo () {
    file { "/etc/${name}": }
    Bar[$name] -> Foo[$name]
}

If you want to write an rspec-puppet unit test for this, it will fail because it can’t find the resource Bar[$name], unless you define it as a precondition:

describe 'foo', :type => :define do
    let(:title) { 'my-foo' }
    let(:pre_condition) { 'bar { "my-foo" }' }
    it { should contain_file('/etc/my-foo') }
end