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

Custom faces


With the release of Puppet 2.6, a brand new concept was introduced: Puppet faces.

Faces are an API that allow easy creation of new Puppet (sub) commands: whenever we execute Puppet, we specify at least one command, which provides access to the functionalities of its subsystems.

The most common commands are agent, apply, master, and cert and have existed for a long time but there are a lot more (we can see their full list with puppet help) and most of them are defined via the faces API.

As you can guess, we can easily add new faces and therefore, new subcommands to the Puppet executable just by placing some files in a module of ours.

The typical synopsis of a face reflects the Puppet command's one:

puppet [FACE] [ACTION] [ARGUMENTS] [OPTIONS]

Where [FACE] is the Puppet subcommand to be executed, [ACTION] is the face's action we want to invoke, [ARGUMENTS] is its arguments, and [OPTIONS] is general Puppet options.

To create a face, we have to work on two files: lib/puppet/application...