managing cron entries with Puppet

Puppet has a predefined type cron. Which is very cool. The only issue is that we don't want to hardcode cron stuff in any pp manifest, since each node has to be configured in a different way.
This is where hiera comes in handy. I personally dislike hiera, and in general all repositories of information which are not bound to a tightly validating schema and which don't natively lend themselves to being queried with a query language. Anyway this is another story.
This is the Puppet class:

class acme::crontab ($acme_crontab_entries = hiera('acme_crontab_entries', {})) {
  create_resources(cron, $acme_crontab_entries)
}

and in your <hostname>.yaml file enter:

acme_crontab_entries :
  logrotate:
    command : '/usr/sbin/logrotate'
    user    : 'soa'
    hour    : '2'
    minute  : '0'    

I can't think of anything simpler.
NOTA BENE:

hiera('acme_crontab_entries', {})

the empty hash {} is needed so that, if a <hostname>.yaml doesn't define the acme_crontab_entries variable, you don't get the message
Could not find data item acme_crontab_entries in any Hiera data file and no default supplied at /tmp/vagrant-puppet/modules-0/acme/manifests/crontab.pp:6 on node osb-vagrant.acme.com

However this is a bit of abuse of hiera.... hiera should contain minimal configuration information, letting the Puppet modules to handle the details.

A more structured approach is to define in hiera only a boolean flag determining is a given cron entry is needed on a specific server: "acme_install_logrotate_service : true" , and then in your init.pp you do:

$acme_install_logrotate_service = hiera('acme_install_logrotate_service', false)
if $acme_install_logrotate_service {
  class {'acme::logrotateservices': }
}

and the class logrotateservices contains the Puppet statement:

cron { logrotate:
  command => "/usr/sbin/logrotate",
  user    => root,
  hour    => ['2-4'],
  minute  => '*/10'
}