puppet adding timestamp in file content

Question

super new to puppet. Could not find good example of how to add timestamp in a file puppet.pp

node '123' {
  file { '/tmp/hello':
    content => "hello world",
  }

  file { '/tmp/timestamped':
    content => 'date',
  }

Just wanted to print current date when this manifest is applied into the file timestamped

version is: 4.10

Answer 1

Puppet (any version)

If you are using version older than 4.8.0 you can use function strftime from the stdlib module.

Puppet (version ≥ 4.8.0)

If you are using newer version of Puppet you should use Timestamp.new().strftime().

Example (you only need to use one of the assignments):

# ISO 8601
$timestamp = Timestamp.new().strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z')
notice ($timestamp)

# RFC 822, 1036, 1124, 2822
$timestamp = Timestamp.new().strftime('%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z')
notice ($timestamp)

file {'/tmp/timestamped':
   ensure  => file,
   content => "${timestamp}",
}

Answer 2

This should work. Use generate to create and assign to a variable. Then assign the variable to be the file's content.

$timestamp = generate('/bin/date', '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S')

file {'/tmp/timestamped':
   content => "$timestamp"
}