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.

Security practices

If you follow good security practices for your network, each user should have her own named account with SSH (not password) access. Any special-purpose accounts should be authorized for the SSH keys of the specific users that need access to them. Login as root should be disallowed (except on a secure console).

User resources

Puppet can manage users directly using the user resource:

user { 'art':
  ensure => present,
  ...
}

You can specify the user's full name with the comment attribute:

comment    => 'Art Vandelay',

Create a home directory with the home and managehome attributes:

home       => '/home/art',
managehome => true,

Removing or locking accounts

To remove a user, change ensure to absent:

user { 'art':
  ensure => absent,
  ...
}

Just removing the user resource from Puppet won't remove the user account from the server, so if you need to delete the account, make sure you use ensure => absent...