Version control is another big helper when you are troubleshooting a problem. Version control systems are great at keeping logs of changes and allowing you to revert changes when they introduce problems. Commit logs are only as good as you make them. When you make your commits, you should remember that the colleague who has to decipher the change you made won't know the reason behind your change. Your commit message should not include what has changed, but why it was changed or what you were attempting to do. If we are debugging a problem, there is a good chance that the change that was made didn't do what was intended.

Another reason to use version control is that version control systems can be configured to prevent the deployment of incorrect code. Git is the de facto standard version control mechanism for Puppet. In the next section, we'll see how we can configure Puppet to use the tools that we've previously discussed to check our code for errors before committing those...