Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

A revolution is happening in web operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to taking full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and building reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems. More and more systems administration and IT jobs require some knowledge of configuration management, and specifically Puppet."Puppet 3 Cookbook" takes you beyond the basics to explore the full power of Puppet, showing you in detail how to tackle a variety of real-world problems and applications. At every step it shows you exactly what commands you need to type, and includes full code samples for every recipe.The book takes the reader from a basic knowledge of Puppet to a complete and expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and extending Puppet by adding your own providers and resources. It starts with guidance on how to set up and expand your Puppet infrastructure, then progresses through detailed information on the language and features, external tools, reporting, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and concludes with many specific recipes for managing popular applications.The book includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world's largest Puppet installations, including a distributed Puppet architecture based on the Git version control system. You'll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera. The book also explains managing Ruby applications and MySQL databases, building web servers, load balancers, high-availability systems with Heartbeat, and many other state-of-the-art techniques
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Puppet 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Logging debug messages


It can be very helpful when debugging problems if you can print out information at a certain point in the manifest. This is a good way to tell, for example, if a variable isn't defined or has an unexpected value. Sometimes it's useful just to know that a particular piece of code has been run. Puppet's notify resource lets you print out such messages.

How to do it…

Define a notify resource in your manifest at the point you want to investigate:

notify { 'Got this far!': }

How it works…

When this resource is applied Puppet will print out the message:

notice: Got this far!

There's more…

If you're the kind of brave soul who likes experimenting, and I hope you are, you'll probably find yourself using debug messages a lot to figure out why your code doesn't work. So knowing how to get the most out of Puppet's debugging features can be a great help.

Printing out variable values

You can refer to variables in the message:

notify { "operatingsystem is ${::operatingsystem}": }

And Puppet...