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

Getting information about the environment


Often in a Puppet manifest, you need to know some local information about the machine you're on. Facter is the tool that accompanies Puppet to provide a standard way of getting information (facts) from the environment about things such as the following:

  • Operating system
  • Memory size
  • Architecture
  • Processor count

To see a complete list of the facts available on your system, run the following code:

$ sudo facter
aio_agent_version => 5.5.3
augeas => {
  version => "1.8.1"
}
...

While it can be handy to get this information from the command line, the real power of Facter lies in being able to access these facts in your Puppet manifests. 

Some modules define their own facts; to see any facts that have been defined locally, add the -p (pluginsync) option to facter, as follows:

$ sudo facter -p

This is deprecated in Puppet5. To access facts defined in puppet, use the puppet facts face instead:

$ puppet facts

Note

puppet facts will return all the facts for a node...