Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank, Martin Alfke
Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank, Martin Alfke

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers

So far in this book, you have primarily done practical things - writing manifests, setting up a master, assigning agents, signing certificates, and so forth. Before you are introduced to the missing language concepts that you will need to use Puppet effectively for bigger projects, there is some background that we should cover. Don't worry, it won't be all dry theory - most of the important parts of Puppet are relevant to your daily business.

The topics of this chapter have been hinted at earlier; Chapter 1, Writing Your First Manifests, contained a brief description of the type and provider. This and some adjacent topics will be thoroughly explored in the sections collecting system information with Facter, understanding the type system, and command execution control with providers.

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