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

Adding external facts


The Creating custom facts recipe describes how to add extra facts to Puppet for use in manifests, but these won't show up in the command-line version of Facter. If you want to make your facts available to both Facter and Puppet, you can create external facts instead.

External facts live in the /etc/facter/facts.d directory, and have a simple key=value format, like this:

message="Hello, world"

Getting ready...

Here's what you need to do to prepare your system for adding external facts:

  1. You'll need at least Facter 1.7 to use external facts, so run this command to check your Facter version:

    ubuntu@cookbook:~$ facter -v
    1.7.1
    
  2. If your version is pre-1.7, you can install a more recent Facter version from the Puppet Labs APT repo. If you haven't already configured your system to use this repo, follow the instructions in the Installing Puppet recipe in Chapter 1, Puppet Infrastructure. Then, run the following commands:

    ubuntu@cookbook:~$ sudo apt-get update
    ubuntu@cookbook:~$ sudo...