Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 10. Extending Puppet

Puppet is impressively extendable. Almost every key component of the software can be extended and replaced by code provided by users.

Most of the time we can use modules to distribute our code to clients, but Puppet goes further; surprising things are possible with the indirector and its termini (somehow strange words that are going to be clearer in the next pages).

This chapter is about understanding and extending Puppet code. We are going to review the following topics:

  • Anatomy of a Puppet run, what happens under the hood

  • What are Puppet extension alternatives?

  • Developing custom functions

  • Developing custom facts

  • Developing custom types and providers

  • Developing custom reports handlers

  • Developing custom faces

The subject is large, we are going to have an overview and show examples that let us dive in some details. For more information about how Puppet works and its inner beauties, check these great sources, in detail:

  • The Puppet Extension Points and Puppet Internals series...