So far, we have learned how to manage Puppet resources with Puppet manifests. In Chapter 1, Puppet Development in Isolation, we created a manifest called user.pp that manages the user accounts for us. In Chapter 2, Managing Packages in Puppet, we wrote more manifests, such as network.pp, to configure host-only network interface and uninstall.pp to purge packages that are not needed on puppet-agent node.

Together with all the manifest files that we created so far, there are several of them already, and we haven't yet started to develop Puppet manifests. As the number of manifests expand, one may start wondering how files can be distributed and applied efficiently across multiple systems.

This chapter will introduce you to Puppet modules and show you how to prepare a simple web server environment with Puppet.

In this chapter, we will focus on the following key areas: