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

Distributing Puppet manifests


So far in this book we've only applied Puppet manifests to one server, using puppet apply with a local copy of the manifest. To manage several servers at once, we need to distribute the Puppet manifests to each machine so that they can be applied.

There are several ways to do this, and Puppet has a built-in server capability (Puppetmaster), which lets each client machine request its own compiled manifest via HTTP. However, when I work with clients to help them build Puppet infrastructures, I usually recommend a different approach, using Git to distribute the manifests.

This has a number of advantages over the Puppetmaster approach, and is in some ways simpler.

Reliability

Although your master Git server (or even GitHub) may go down, you will still be able to run Puppet on all your client machines and push changes to them using Git. Git is inherently distributed, unlike the Puppetmaster architecture.

Scalability

You can keep on adding machines indefinitely, and each...