The best way to learn is by doing, so here are some things you might like to try to do with Puppet that will improve your skills and your infrastructure at the same time. Most of these projects are fairly small—a few hours of work, maybe—but each will give you a valuable win and make your life easier. They provide a series of stepping-stones from your first use of Puppet to a completely automated environment.
Project: First, install Puppet on all the machines you're responsible for. Set up a central Git repo as described in Chapter 4, Managing Puppet with Git, and have each of the machines pull from the repo and run Puppet automatically. For now, Puppet won't actually manage anything, so all your node declarations will look like this:
node 'kermit' {
}That's fine. Once you've got Puppet everywhere, you can start adding things to it.
Win: It's now easy to add configuration to any machine, simply by putting something in its node declaration.