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

Custom facts


Custom facts are a client-side technology for extracting arbitrary information from the node during the execution of the agent run, and they may be utilized in Puppet manifests or templates, along with any other distributed facts. Facts are executed on the Puppet agent.

The best way to create and distribute a new custom fact is to place it in a module, in the facter subdirectory of the lib directory, and it will then be distributed to the agent machine via pluginsync.

Note

This documentation page at https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/plugins_in_modules.html#adding-plug-ins-to-a-module shows you exactly where in a module to place your code, and the section at https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/plugins_in_modules.html#installing-plug-ins, in the same documentation, shows the technical details for pluginsync.

The following diagram illustrates the pluginsync process that precedes a normal catalog request. Usually, a GET method is called on the Puppet server using the FQDN, which then...