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

Tiny Puppet


As we can see when developing Puppet modules, when we want to configure a service, whatever it is, we follow more or less the same pattern: we install the software, we deploy the configuration files, and we start the services.

Tiny Puppet (http://tiny-puppet.com/) is an ambitious project that aims to provide a unified way to manage any kind of software in any operating system using minimalistic code by taking advantage of this common pattern that most modules implement.

The project is basically divided into two parts. One is a smart module with a collection of definitions that can manage the basic use cases: packages installation, configuration files management, and additional repositories setup. The second part is tiny data, a repository of Hiera data that defines the characteristics of each supported software so the first module knows how to manage it.

Then, for example, to install an Apache server in any of the supported operating systems, we only need the tiny Puppet module...