Feature Request: only install files necessary for Puppet to function

[stefanbethke]

Our modules contain a lot of infrastructure for testing and similar purposes; they are not needed when Puppet is using the module.

When using kitchen-puppet, all these files are copied into the target machine, which takes a significant amount of time.

A new config option --slim would only make the files and directories available that are necessary for Puppet to function (see https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/modules_fundamentals.html#module-layout)

[ekohl]

I feel like this shouldn't be solved here but rather at publishing layer. https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.0/modules_publishing.html#excluding-files-from-the-package is IMHO the road to go. That way you end up with small modules on the forge. I haven't looked at git checkouts and we probably don't do anything there. Using the same logic (either reuse this from puppet or implement it ourselves) would make sense to me.

[joekohlsdorf]

Unfortunately we can't force anyone to publish their modules in this manner onto the forge, even official modules contain things like spec files. In addition to this I personally don't use or want a forge for my own modules, I check them out directly from git.

But I also don't like the idea of including a --slim parameter with hardcoded defaults. A configurable file with a list of inclusions would be better because I can imagine some use cases where additional folders that aren't in the module layout list would be useful.

This could also be tackled in the kitchen-puppet vagrant provisioner. In fact I think this is also a better place to make the change which was originally proposed.

[joekohlsdorf]

@stefanbethke I just checked kitchen-puppet code and found that the functionality to exclude module paths from being synced to the VM already exists. The configuration option is named ignored_paths_from_root.