Booleans

Booleans are one-bit values, representing true or false. The condition of an if statement expects an expression that resolves to a Boolean value. All of Puppet's comparison operators resolve to Boolean values, as do many functions.

The Boolean data type has two possible values: true and false. Literal Booleans must be one of these two bare words (that is, not in quotation marks).

Automatic conversion to Boolean

If a non-Boolean value is used where a Boolean is required:

• The undef value is converted to Boolean false.
• All other values are converted to Boolean true.

Notably, this means the string values "" (a zero-length string) and "false" (in quotation marks) both resolve to true.

To convert values to Booleans with more permissive rules (for example, 0 to false, or "false" to false), use the str2bool and num2bool functions in the puppetlabs-stdlib module.

The Boolean data type

The data type of Boolean values is Boolean.

It matches only the values true or false.

It can accept parameters of either [true] or [false] to restrict accepted data to the parameter-specified value. For example: Boolean[true] $b

You can use abstract types to match values that might be Boolean or might have some other value. For example, Optional[Boolean] matches true, false, or undef. Variant[Boolean, Enum["true", "false"]] matches stringified Booleans as well as true Booleans.