[[!meta title="Cdist: How to copy a folder recursively"]]

## Introduction

This article describes one solution to transfer a folder
and all of its contents recursively with [[cdist|software/cdist]]
to target hosts. I am motivated to do so, because I want to have one
central place to configure the tftproot that I may use on a variety
of KVM hosts.

Traditionally, it is not an easy job to handle recursive transfer correctly
and efficiently in a configuration management system. Using a sophisticated
tool like [rsync](http://rsync.samba.org/) or
[unison](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) makes life 
usually way easier.

If you just have a minor number of files, like I have in this case,
doing a recursive copy with cdist may be the easist way.

## Copying the files recursively

Cdist knows about the types **\_\_file** and **\_\_directory** for
file transfer and directory management.
The type **\_\_nico\_tftp\_root**,
which can be found in the
[cdist-nico git repository](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=cdist-nico)
(below **cdist/conf/type**) recursively copies all files it contains to
the folder **/home/service/tftp**. Only when a file is changed, it
is transferred again (the **\_\_file** type takes care of this).

## The manifest

In cdist, a manifest of a type defines, which other types to use.
A manifest file is essentially shell code that can call other
cdist types.

To accomplish the task, first of all the base directory is created
on the remote site:

    basedir=/home/services/tftp
    __directory "$basedir" --mode 0755
    
Afterwards, I change into the source directory
and find all files. Cdist exports the
variable "__type" to access the folder in which the type is stored.

    cd "$__type/files"
    
    for file in $(find . | sed 's;./;;' | grep -v '^\.$' ); do

The grep command is needed, to skip the current directory, that is returned
by find.

Now, for every file I determine the remote file name. Furthermore
dependencies to the required directories are setup: 
You can **require** another type to be run before a type, by setting
up the **require** environment variable (this will be changed in cdist
2.1. and replaced in 2.2, but there is still some time until this happens).

The remote name is constructed by this line:

        name="$basedir/$file"
    
And the requirement is setup using this line:

        # Require the previous directory in the path
        export require="__directory/${name%/*}"

The shell (!) knows about string manipulation: ${variablename%/\*} replaces
the shortest matching suffix that equals "/\*". And thus the previous
statement removes the last part of the path (also known as dirname).

If the file found by find is a file, we call the \_\_file type,
if the file is actually a directory, the \_\_directory type is called:

        if [ -d "$file" ]; then
            __directory "$name" --mode 0755
        else
            __file "$basedir/$file" --source "$__type/files/$file" \
                --mode 0644
        fi
    done

And that's it - a full recursive copy with just a bunch of lines.

## Further Reading

* [[cdist|software/cdist]]
* [cdist-nico git repository](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=cdist-nico)
* [manifest of __nico_tftp_root](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=cdist-nico;a=blob;f=cdist/conf/type/__nico_tftp_root/manifest;h=b312210d878b30e5871751d62cea14172f63c756;hb=HEAD)

[[!tag cdist config unix]]