Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system that automates all your IT configurations, giving you control of managing each node. Puppet 5 Cookbook will take you through Puppet's latest and most advanced features, including Docker containers, Hiera, and AWS Cloud Orchestration. Updated with the latest advancements and best practices, this book delves into various aspects of writing good Puppet code, which includes using Puppet community style, checking your manifests with puppet-lint, and learning community best practices with an emphasis on real-world implementation. You will learn to set up, install, and create your first manifests with version control, and also learn about various sysadmin tasks, including managing configuration files, using Augeas, and generating files from snippets and templates. As the book progresses, you'll explore virtual resources and use Puppet's resource scheduling and auditing features. In the concluding chapters, you'll walk through managing applications and writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers. By the end of this book, you will have learned to report, log, and debug your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating a manifest


If you already have some Puppet code (known as a Puppet manifest), you can skip this section and go on to the next. If not, we'll see how to create and apply a simple manifest.

How to do it...

To create and apply a simple manifest, follow these steps:

  1. With Puppet installed in the previous section, we can create a directory to contain our Puppet code:
t@cookbook:~$ mkdir -p .puppet/manifests
t@cookbook:~$ cd .puppet/manifests
t@cookbook:manifests$
  1. Within your manifests directory, create the site.pp file with the following content:
 node default {
   file { '/tmp/hello':
     content => "Hello, world!\n",
   }
 }
  1. Test your manifest with the puppet apply command. This will tell Puppet to read the manifest, compare it to the state of the machine, and make any necessary changes to that state:
t@cookbook:manifests$ puppet apply site.pp
Notice: Compiled catalog for cookbook.example.com in environment production in 0.05 seconds
Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[default]/File[/tmp/hello]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}746308829575e17c3331bbcb00c0898b'
Notice: Applied catalog in 0.07 seconds
  1. To see if Puppet did what we expected (created the /tmp/hello file with the Hello, world! content), run the following command:
t@cookbook:manifests$ cat /tmp/hello
Hello, world!

Note that creating the file in /tmp did not require special permissions. We did not run Puppet via sudo. Puppet need not be run through sudo; there are cases where running via an unprivileged user can be useful.

There's more...

When several people are working on a code base, it's easy for style inconsistencies to creep in. Fortunately, there's a tool available that can automatically check your code for compliance with the style guide: puppet-lint. We'll see how to use this in the next section.