Puppet Community

why do you need to check if the user is defined?

defined() depends on the ordering in the catalog. rule of thumb: try to avoid it

Ah - well - I'm checking to see if the user exists because I want to apply an ssh_authorized_key resource, and I _DON'T_ want to do that if the user resource for that user doesn't exist.

because that would mean the user's _home_ directory would not exist.

I am totally open to doing this in another way

configure the keys where you create the user

I need to head out in a few minutes,if you can share the code I can give somr advise tomorrow

I’d say as long as you have list of users defined somewhere (hiera?) you can iterate over it and create resources you need

Or use a `require =&gt; User['whomever']` for your keys and puppet will make sure the user is created before the keys