Book Image

Puppet 3: Beginner's Guide

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 3: Beginner's Guide

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

<p>Everyone's talking about Puppet, the open-source DevOps technology that lets you automate your server setups and manage websites, databases, and desktops. Puppet can build new servers in seconds, keep your systems constantly up to date, and automate daily maintenance tasks. <br /><br />"Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide" gets you up and running with Puppet straight away, with complete real world examples. Each chapter builds your skills, adding new Puppet features, always with a practical focus. You'll learn everything you need to manage your whole infrastructure with Puppet.<br /><br />"Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide" takes you from complete beginner to confident Puppet user, through a series of clear, simple examples, with full explanations at every stage.</p> <p>Through a series of worked examples introducing Puppet to a fictional web company, you'll learn how to manage every aspect of your server setup. Switching to Puppet needn't be a big, long-term project; this book will show you how to start by bringing one small part of your systems under Puppet control and, little by little, building to the point where Puppet is managing your whole infrastructure.</p> <p>Presented in an easy-to-read guide to learning Puppet from scratch, this book explains simply and clearly all you need to know to use this essential IT power tool, all the time applying these solutions to real-world scenarios.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


A quick rundown of what we've learned in this chapter.

Installing Puppet

You can install Puppet by downloading and installing the Puppet Labs APT repo package, then running apt-get install puppet.

Manifests

A manifest consists of a list of resource declarations. A resource declaration specifies a particular aspect of system configuration that you want Puppet to manage: a file, for example.

Resource declarations consist of a name and a list of attributes. The resource name is a unique identifier, which you can use to refer to this specific resource, if you need to. Its attributes specify various things about the resource that you want to control with Puppet.

Different types of resources have different attributes, but for a file resource, attributes include content, which specifies the contents of the file as a string.

Puppet processes a manifest by comparing the specified resources to what currently exists on the machine. Any missing resources will be created; attributes that do not match...