Problem

You are trying to work with puppet modules in AWS, after installing puppet as a gem, but when you try to put the modules and manifests outside the main manifests/site.pp file you get an error similar to following:

Error: Could not find class apache2 for ip-xx-xx-xx-xx.eu-west-1.compute.internal on node ip-xx-xx-xx-xx.eu-west-1.compute.internal

Solution

Create a file for the puppet configuration in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf and add the paths to your own manifests and modules, like :

$aws sudo vi /etc/puppet/puppet.conf

and add your paths:

[main]
manifest = /home/ubuntu/puppet/manifests/site.pp
modulepath = /etc/puppet/modules:/usr/share/puppet/modules:/home/ubuntu/puppet/modules