Book Image

Learning Puppet Security

Book Image

Learning Puppet Security

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Puppet Security
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

PuppetDB and reporting


We briefly touched on what PuppetDB was in Chapter 1, Puppet as a Security Tool. It is a backend database engine that stores information on your Puppet environment.

We can query this information directly to see the current status of a host, get information on its current resources, and more. Additionally, it contains a complete set of reports if configured to do so.

PuppetDB contains a very rich API allowing us to use RESTful API calls via HTTP to retrieve information.

Note

REST, which is shorthand for Representational State Transfer, is a method of laying out an API using representations of a given resource. In this case, the resources will be information about Puppet. It makes querying and modifying information using HTTP fairly straightforward.

Before we can play with PuppetDB, we need to install it. Luckily, there's a handy Puppet module provided by Puppet Labs that can help us.

Go ahead and spin up your machine (refer to Chapter 1, Puppet as a Security Tool or Chapter...