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 is version control?


If you haven't used Git, or a similar version control tool (CVS and Subversion are some other examples), you might be wondering what it is and why we should use it. To explain this, let's look back to one of the system administration problems we talked about in Chapter 1, Introduction to Puppet: the problem of tracking code changes.

Even if you're the only person who works on a piece of source code (for example, Puppet manifests), it's still useful to be able to see what changes you made, and when. For example, you might remember that you fixed a bug last week, but not exactly how, and it would be handy to be able to see exactly what lines in which file were changed.

When you're working on code with others, you need a way to communicate changes to the rest of the team. A version control tool such as Git not only tracks everyone's changes, but lets you record a message about what you did and why. For example, a change might be marked with the following message:

Author...