Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

A revolution is happening in web operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to taking full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and building reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems. More and more systems administration and IT jobs require some knowledge of configuration management, and specifically Puppet."Puppet 3 Cookbook" takes you beyond the basics to explore the full power of Puppet, showing you in detail how to tackle a variety of real-world problems and applications. At every step it shows you exactly what commands you need to type, and includes full code samples for every recipe.The book takes the reader from a basic knowledge of Puppet to a complete and expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and extending Puppet by adding your own providers and resources. It starts with guidance on how to set up and expand your Puppet infrastructure, then progresses through detailed information on the language and features, external tools, reporting, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and concludes with many specific recipes for managing popular applications.The book includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world's largest Puppet installations, including a distributed Puppet architecture based on the Git version control system. You'll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera. The book also explains managing Ruby applications and MySQL databases, building web servers, load balancers, high-availability systems with Heartbeat, and many other state-of-the-art techniques
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Puppet 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Managing Ruby


Ruby is a popular language for web apps, and it's a common sysadmin challenge to manage the different Ruby versions required for different applications. Managing Ruby with Puppet adds a little extra fun as Puppet itself requires a certain version of Ruby.

The most common ways to manage Ruby on servers are:

  • Use the distro package (for example stock Ruby 1.8.7 from Ubuntu Precise)

  • Source install a custom version of Ruby

  • Package your own build of Ruby

  • Use RVM to manage Ruby versions

  • Use rbenv to manage Ruby versions

In many cases the distro package will be fine, which makes things easy. However, if you need a different version of Ruby from the distro package, you have a choice to make about how to manage it. If you install a custom Ruby from source, or package your own, you'll either have to replace the system Ruby, or figure out how to have both versions co-exist without interfering with one another.

RVM and rbenv are specifically designed to handle different versions of Ruby on a machine...