Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank
Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank

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)

Writing Your First Manifests

Configuration management has become essential to the IT world. Faster development using agile methods has a huge impact on IT operations that need to keep pace with the faster deployment of systems. Server operations in general are hardly even feasible without a robust management infrastructure. Among the available tools, Puppet has established itself as one of the most popular and widespread solutions. Originally written by Luke Kanies, the tool is now distributed under the terms of Apache License 2.0 and maintained by Luke's company, Puppet Inc. It boasts a large and bustling community, rich APIs for plugins and supporting tools, outstanding online documentation, and a great security model based on SSL authentication.

Like all configuration management systems, Puppet allows you to maintain a central repository of infrastructure definitions, along with a toolchain to enforce the desired state on the systems under management. The whole feature set is quite impressive. This book will guide you through some steps to quickly grasp the most important aspects and principles of Puppet.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Getting started
  • Introducing resources, parameters, and properties
  • Interpreting the output of the puppet apply command
  • Using variables
  • Adding control structures in manifests
  • Controlling the order of execution
  • Implementing resource interaction
  • Examining Puppet core resource types