Welcome to the Instant Puppet 3 Starter. This book will provide you with all the information that you need to set up and use Puppet 3. You will learn the core components of Puppet, set up a working client and server, and start building your first custom module.

This book contains the following sections:

So what is Puppet 3? – In this section, we find out what Puppet does, how it works, and how it can drastically improve the consistency of your systems while reducing the effort involved in maintaining them. Learn about the difference between deterministic and procedural results. Most importantly, learn how to get better results every time by thinking about and expressing your desired outcome in a deterministic fashion.

Installation – In this section, learn how to download and install Puppet 3. Learn how to get your environment working immediately, without needing help from others.

Quick start – This section will show you how to use the core methods included within Puppet to reduce the amount of manual work and rework you do every day. Then you’ll learn how to write a custom Puppet module to do something important and necessary for you. By the end of this section, you’ll have Puppet working throughout your environment.

Top 5 features you need to know about – In this section you will learn how to perform five useful tasks for managing and expanding your Puppet ecosystem. By the end of this section, you will be able to review the history of changes made to your systems by Puppet, compare and restore the previous versions of files that were changed by Puppet, build a test environment for developing new modules, use an external data source for your configuration policies, and run the Puppet server as a Ruby on Rails application to improve performance.

People and places you should get to know – Puppet has a very active developer and user community. This section provides you with many useful links to the project page and mailing lists, as well as a number of helpful articles and tutorials.