Using Puppet Forge

It maybe goes without saying that there's no reason to reinvent the wheel when you are authoring your Puppet modules. A few minutes in Puppet Forge (https://forge.puppet.com) can really save you days and days of editing. There are, at the time of writing, more than 5,000 Forge modules, so it makes a great deal of sense to leverage all that hard work done by the Puppet community. Search the Forge first for that bit of software; it's more than likely that something already exists.

In my experience, I have found there is often something that almost does the job. Maybe there's a module (usually an unsupported and unapproved one) that maybe, for example, performs the management for the software you require, but it's only for Ubuntu, and you're using Red Hat. It's usually a better approach to fork that module, whatever shape it's in, and work on that, rather than start from scratch.