Book Image

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

Puppet 5 Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 5, including Docker containers, Hiera data, and Amazon AWS cloud orchestration. Go from beginner to confident Puppet user with a series of clear, practical examples to help you manage every aspect of your server setup. Whether you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about Puppet, you’ll learn Puppet skills that you can put into practice right away. With practical steps giving you the key concepts you need, this book teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more. Every example in this book deals with something real and practical that you’re likely to need in your work, and you’ll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions for what to type and what output you’ll see. All the examples are available in a GitHub repo for you to download and adapt for your own server setup.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

What are templates?


In previous chapters, we've used Puppet to manage the contents of files on the node by various means, including setting the contents to a literal string using the content attribute, and copying a file from a Puppet module using the source attribute. While these methods are very useful, they are limited in one respect: they can only use static text, rather than building the contents of the file dynamically, based on Puppet data.

The dynamic data problem

To see why this is a problem, consider a common Puppet file management task such as a backup script. There are a number of site- and node-specific things the backup script needs to know: the local directories to back up, the destination to copy them to, and any credentials needed to access the backup storage. While we could insert these into the script as literal values, this is rather inflexible. We might have to maintain several versions of the script, each identical to the others except for a backup location, for example...