Set variable to be contents of file

Question

Running Puppet 3.5

I've got a case definition that checks for matching FQDNs, then sets a variable to be a static file depending on the FQDN. There is a total of 4 FQDN match cases, but that could grow, so I am trying to make this scalable without duplicating 10 lines of code for each case.

As an example, my source file is in modules/auth/files/bi-k5login on the puppetmaster. It's a list of users, 1 per line. The variable will then be used as an input to write the file in another function.

I've tried:

 $princs = file('auth/files/bi-k5login') 
 $princs = file('auth/bi-k5login') 
 $princs = file('puppet:///modules/auth/bi-k5login')

And each time, I get a "Files must be fully qualified" error.

Either my syntax is wrong, or I cannot use the file() function the way I am intending. Since this is super old Puppet 3.5, documentation is hard to come by.

Prior to my current issue, I had this working by referencing the file a different way, but it added a lot more lines of code.

           file { '/root/.k5login' :
               ensure  => 'present',
               mode    => '0640',
               owner   => 'root',
               group   => 'root',
               source  => 'puppet:///modules/auth/bi-k5login',
               seltype => 'krb5_home_t',
               selrole => 'object_r',
               seluser => 'system_u',
           }

THIS works just fine, but repeat that for each possible case (but using a different k5login file) and the file grows in size awfully quick and I am trying to avoid that.