Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By : Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate
Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By: Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language written for and by system administrators to manage a large number of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drift. The core topics this book addresses are Puppet's latest features and mastering Puppet Enterprise. You will begin by writing a new Puppet module, gaining an understanding of the guidelines and style of the Puppet community. Following on from this, you will take advantage of the roles and profiles pattern, and you will learn how to structure your code. Next, you will learn how to extend Puppet and write custom facts, functions, types, and providers in Ruby, and also use the new features of Hiera 5. You will also learn how to configure the new Code Manager component, and how to ensure code is automatically deployed to (multiple) Puppet servers. Next, you will learn how to integrate Puppet with Jenkins and Git to build an effective workflow for multiple teams, and use the new Puppet Tasks feature and the latest Puppet Orchestrator language extensions. Finally, you will learn how to scale and troubleshoot Puppet. By the end of the book, you will be able to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Writing great documentation


Another important recommendation is to simply write great documentation. There's nothing worse, I feel, as a developer, than to have to dig into the code to understand how a module works; it's like having to lift the hood of the car to understand how to drive a vehicle!

Get good at writing English to convey technical ideas! I really think it's a skill that every good developer really needs to master.

Grabbing yourself a Markdown editor

Puppet modules use markdown for their documentation formatting. So it makes sense to use either a standalone Markdown editor, or some plugins for your IDE, so that you can create your quality documentation appropriately. Following on from our selection of code IDEs that we considered earlier in the chapter, the corresponding markdown plugins follow.

 

Vim

You can use the vim-instant-markdown plugin (https://github.com/suan/vim-instant-markdown) if you're a vim fan.

TextMate

You can use the TextMate markdown bundle (https://github.com/textmate/markdown.tmbundle) if you enjoy the Apple look and feel of TextMate.

Atom

If, like me, you enjoy using Atom, you can use the Markdown Preview Plus package (https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-plus).

Visual Studio

If you're a developer in the Windows and .NET world, then look no further than the Markdown editor extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MadsKristensen.MarkdownEditor).

Standalone Markdown editors

If you would rather use a standalone Markdown editor, I can recommend personally MacDown for macOS X. My (very) short list of standalone Markdown editors for various operating systems follows.

Remarkable

If you're using Linux, then Remarkable is probably the best standalone editor. It also works on Windows. Some of its features include live preview, exporting to PDF and HTML, GitHub markdown, custom CSS, syntax highlighting, and keyboard shortcuts.

 

 

MacDown

If you would rather use a standalone Markdown editor, I can recommend MacDown for macOS X, which is free (open source). It's heavily inspired by Mou, and is designed with web developers in mind. It has configurable syntax highlighting, live preview, and auto-completion. If you're looking for a lean, fast, configurable standalone Markdown editor, this might be the one for you.