Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The puppetdbquery module


By now, we have realized how comprehensive the amount of information stored on PuppetDB is, as it provides a complete view of all our nodes facts, catalogs, and reports. This is useful for a review of what happens on our infrastructure and for the metrics we can extract via queries on all the resources managed by Puppet, but that's not enough.

One of Puppet's limitations, the fact that a node basically has knowledge only about itself via its catalog, and can "interact" with other nodes only via exported resources, would be wiped out if it were possible to make all PuppetDB data at our disposal when compiling a catalog for a node.

Well, this is possible, and can be easily done via Eric Dalén's puppetdbquery module.

Consider it the key that opens PuppetDB wonders to our Puppet code. It provides the following:

  • Command line tools (as a Puppet face)

  • Functions to query PuppetDB directly in our manifests

  • A Hiera backend.

This module enables PuppetDB integration to the next level...