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)

Enhancing Puppet's system knowledge through facts

When facts were introduced in Chapter 3, A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers, you got a small tour of the process of creating your own custom facts.
We hinted at modules at that point, and now, we can take a closer look at how the fact code is deployed, using the example of the Cacti module. Let's focus on native Ruby facts - they are more portable than the external facts. As the latter are easy to create, there is no need to discuss them in depth here.

For details on external facts, you can refer to the online documentation on custom facts on the Puppet Labs site at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/facter/latest/custom_facts.html#external-facts.

Facts are part of the Puppet plugins that a module can contain, just as the types and providers from the previous sections. They belong in the lib/facter...