Book Image

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

Puppet 5 Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 5, including Docker containers, Hiera data, and Amazon AWS cloud orchestration. Go from beginner to confident Puppet user with a series of clear, practical examples to help you manage every aspect of your server setup. Whether you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about Puppet, you’ll learn Puppet skills that you can put into practice right away. With practical steps giving you the key concepts you need, this book teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more. Every example in this book deals with something real and practical that you’re likely to need in your work, and you’ll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions for what to type and what output you’ll see. All the examples are available in a GitHub repo for you to download and adapt for your own server setup.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Cron resources


Cron is the mechanism on Unix-like systems which runs scheduled jobs, sometimes known as batch jobs, at specified times or intervals. For example, system housekeeping tasks, such as log rotation or checking for security updates, are run from cron. The details of what to run and when to run it are kept in a specially formatted file called crontab (short for cron table).

Puppet provides the cron resource for managing scheduled jobs, and we saw an example of this in the run-puppet manifest we developed in Chapter 3, Managing your Puppet code with Git (run-puppet.pp):

cron { 'run-puppet':
  command => '/usr/local/bin/run-puppet',
  hour    => '*',
  minute  => '*/15',
}

The title run-puppet identifies the cron job (Puppet writes a comment to the crontab file containing this name to distinguish it from other manually-configured cron jobs). The command attribute specifies the command for cron to run, and the hour and minute specify the time (*/15 is a cron syntax, meaning...