Bare words

Puppet treats certain bare words — that is, runs of alphanumeric characters without surrounding quotation marks — as single-word strings. Bare word strings are most commonly used with resource attributes that accept a limited number of one-word values.

To be treated as a string, a bare word must:

  • Begin with a lower case letter;

  • Contain only letters, digits, hyphens (-), and underscores (_); and

  • Not be a reserved word.

For example, in the following code, running is a bare word string: 

service { "ntp":
  ensure => running, # bare word string
}
Unquoted words that begin with upper case letters are interpreted as data types or resource references, not strings.

Bare word strings can’t interpolate values and can’t use escape sequences.