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

Types and providers


Puppet already has a very rich lexicon of built-in resource types (see https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/type.html), and these have also been extended with additional modules. Windows-specific resource types would be a very good example of where Puppet has had its resource types successfully extended (see https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.3/resources_windows_optional.html).

The following are some indications that you may want to consider writing a type and provider as an alternative to regular modules and manifests in Puppet DSL:

  • You have several exec statements in your Puppet DSL with convoluted onlyif and unless conditional properties
  • Puppet doesn't handle situation very well where:
    • Your Puppet DSL is not a powerful-enough API, and you need access to pure Ruby to manipulate data
    • Your Puppet DSL code has significant and quite convoluted conditional logic

Types

Go through the following steps to create your type:

  1. Create and distribute the type
  2. Add the namevar special attribute...