Book Image

Puppet 3: Beginner's Guide

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 3: Beginner's Guide

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

<p>Everyone's talking about Puppet, the open-source DevOps technology that lets you automate your server setups and manage websites, databases, and desktops. Puppet can build new servers in seconds, keep your systems constantly up to date, and automate daily maintenance tasks. <br /><br />"Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide" gets you up and running with Puppet straight away, with complete real world examples. Each chapter builds your skills, adding new Puppet features, always with a practical focus. You'll learn everything you need to manage your whole infrastructure with Puppet.<br /><br />"Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide" takes you from complete beginner to confident Puppet user, through a series of clear, simple examples, with full explanations at every stage.</p> <p>Through a series of worked examples introducing Puppet to a fictional web company, you'll learn how to manage every aspect of your server setup. Switching to Puppet needn't be a big, long-term project; this book will show you how to start by bringing one small part of your systems under Puppet control and, little by little, building to the point where Puppet is managing your whole infrastructure.</p> <p>Presented in an easy-to-read guide to learning Puppet from scratch, this book explains simply and clearly all you need to know to use this essential IT power tool, all the time applying these solutions to real-world scenarios.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What you'll need


To follow the examples in this chapter, you'll need a computer, preferably running Linux, connected to the Internet. You'll also need to be able to run commands in a terminal and do simple editing of the text files. You'll also need to be able to acquire root-level access via sudo.

Although Puppet runs on a number of different platforms, I'm not going to provide detailed instructions for all of them. Throughout this book I'll be using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise" distribution of Linux for my examples. I'll point out where specific commands or file locations are likely to be different for other operating systems.

I'm using an Amazon EC2 cloud instance to demonstrate setting up Puppet, though you may prefer to use a physical server, a Linux workstation, or a Vagrant virtual machine (with Internet access). I'll log in as the Ubuntu user and use sudo to run commands that need root privileges (the default setup on Ubuntu).