Cleaning up old files

Puppet's tidy resource will help you clean up old or out-of-date files, reducing disk usage. For example, if you have Puppet reporting enabled as described in the section on generating reports, you might want to regularly delete old report files.

How to do it...

Let's get started.

1. Modify your site.pp file as follows:

   node 'cookbook' {
     tidy { '/var/lib/puppet/reports':
       age     => '1w',
       recurse => true,
     }
   }

2. Run Puppet:

   [root@cookbook clients]# puppet agent -t
   Info: Caching catalog for cookbook.example.com
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201409090637.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201409100556.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201409090631.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201408210557.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201409080557.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201409100558.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201408210546.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/File[/var/lib/puppet/reports/cookbook.example.com/201408210539.yaml]/ensure: removed
   Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.80 seconds
   

How it works...

Puppet searches the specified path for any files matching the age parameter; in this case, 2w (two weeks). It also searches subdirectories (recurse => true).

Any files matching your criteria will be deleted.

There's more...

You can specify file ages in seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks by using a single character to specify the time unit, as follows:

• 60s
• 180m
• 24h
• 30d
• 4w

You can specify that files greater than a given size should be removed, as follows:

size => '100m',

This removes files of 100 megabytes and over. For kilobytes, use k, and for bytes, use b.

Note

Note that if you specify both age and size parameters, they are treated as independent criteria. For example, if you specify the following, Puppet will remove all files that are either at least one day old, or at least 512 KB in size:

age => "1d",

size => "512k",