Estou escrevendo uma resposta atualizada para notificar leitores futuros de que agora o recurso File realmente implementa a origem HTTP.
De os documentos :
source
A source file, which will be copied into place on the local system. This attribute is mutually exclusive with content and target. Allowed values are:
- puppet: URIs, which point to files in modules or Puppet file server mount points.
- Fully qualified paths to locally available files (including files on NFS shares or Windows mapped drives).
- file: URIs, which behave the same as local file paths.
- http: URIs, which point to files served by common web servers
Assim, você pode usar a construção conforme a escreveu:
file { "/home/text.txt":
source => "http://www.example.com/text.txt",
}