Puppet/Vagrant: corrupted apache virtualhost content

Question

I am using a vagrant/puppet to configure my testmachine, i am using it to configure the virtualhost for apache, but when starting apache i get an error, apparently for weird spacing or characters or so:

/apache2 start
 * Starting web server apache2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
Syntax error on line 4 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my-ssl.localhost.conf:
Invalid command '\xc2\xa0\xc2\xa0ServerName', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
Action 'start' failed.

the manifest file that i wrote to configure the virtualhost looks like this

file {'hostfile4':
      path    => '/etc/apache2/sites-available/my-ssl.localhost.conf',
      ensure  => present,
      content => "
<VirtualHost *:443>
  DocumentRoot '/coding/mysite/htdocs/'
  ServerName foa-ssl.localhost
  ServerAlias foa-ssl.localhost
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
  RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log
  RewriteLogLevel 0
    <Directory '/coding/mysite/checkout/htdocs'>
        AllowOverride All
        Options All -Indexes
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        php_admin_value short_open_tag Off
        AddType application/x-httpd-php .css .js
    </Directory>
    <Directory '/coding/mysite/app_new/htdocs'>
        AllowOverride All
        Options All -Indexes
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        php_admin_value short_open_tag Off
        AddType application/x-httpd-php .css .js
    </Directory>
  <Directory '/coding/mysite/cgi-bin'>
    Options +ExecCGI
  </Directory>
  SSLEngine on
  SSLCertificateFile    /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
</VirtualHost>",
    }

Answer 1

c2 a0 (in the error message) is the unicode code for the special character "non breaking space", cf. here.

It seems that apache doesn't like that at all. So you must get rid of those non-breaking spaces and use normal ones, even if it looks the same in your editor.

You can use NotePad++ and ask it to convert your puppet files to "ANSI", which is a safer encoding for config files.

You must have cleaned that without knowing it while moving the content to an external file, but using an external file is not the solution, even if it worked.

Answer 2

solved it using this:

file { "/etc/apache2/sites-available/my-ssl.localhost.conf":
    mode => 440,
    owner => root,
    group => root,
    source => "/coding/puppetstuff/my-ssl.localhost.conf"
}

/coding/puppetstuff/foa-ssl.localhost.conf is in a shared folder (path is on image)