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)

Managing environments

Puppet doesn't organize things in modules exclusively. There is a higher-level unit called environment that groups and contains the modules. An environment mainly consists of:

  • One or more site manifest files
  • A modules directory with your modules inside
  • An optional environment.conf configuration file

When the master compiles the manifest for a node, it uses exactly one environment for this task. As described in Chapter 2, Puppet Server and Agents, it always starts in manifests/*.pp, which form the environment's site manifest. Before we take a look at how this works in practice, let's look at an example environment directory:

/opt/puppetlabs/code/environments/
\- production/
|- environment.conf
|- manifests/
| |- site.pp
| \- nodes.pp
\- modules/
|- my_app/
\- ntp/

The...