Book Image

Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Felix Frank, Martin Alfke
Book Image

Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Felix Frank, Martin Alfke

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach. Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you’ll put Puppet’s tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We’ll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we’ll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies. By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain.

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Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition - Second Edition
Felix Frank | Martin Alfke
Dec, 2015 | 246 pages
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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Puppet 4 Essentials Second Edition
Puppet 4 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Writing Your First Manifests
Writing Your First Manifests
Getting started
Introducing resources and properties
Interpreting the output of the puppet apply command
Adding control structures in manifests
Using variables
Controlling the order of evaluation
Implementing resource interaction
Examining the most notable resource types
Summary
2
The Master and Its Agents
The Master and Its Agents
The Puppet Master
Setting up the Puppet Agent
Performance considerations
Using Phusion Passenger with Nginx
Completing the stack with PuppetDB
Troubleshooting SSL issues
Summary
3
A Peek under the Hood – Facts, Types, and Providers
A Peek under the Hood – Facts, Types, and Providers
Summarizing systems with Facter
Understanding the type system
Substantiating the model with providers
Putting it all together
Summary
4
Modularizing Manifests with Classes and Defined Types
Modularizing Manifests with Classes and Defined Types
Introducing classes and defined types
Structured design patterns
Including classes from defined types
Establishing relationships among containers
Making classes more flexible through parameters
Summary
5
Extending Your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules
Extending Your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules
An overview of Puppet's modules
Maintaining environments
Building a specific module
Finding helpful Forge modules
Summary
6
Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language
Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language
Templating dynamic configuration files
Creating virtual resources
Exporting resources to other agents
Overriding resource parameters
Avoiding antipatterns
Summary
7
New Features from Puppet 4
New Features from Puppet 4
Upgrading to Puppet 4
Using the type system
Learning lambdas and functions
Creating Puppet 4 functions
Leveraging the new template engine
Handling multiline with HEREDOC
Breaking old practices
Summary
8
Separating Data from Code Using Hiera
Separating Data from Code Using Hiera
Understanding the need for separate data storage
Structuring configuration data in a hierarchy
Retrieving and using Hiera values in manifests
Converting resources to data
Debugging Hiera lookups
Implementing the Roles and Profiles pattern
Summary
Index
Index

Maintaining environments

Puppet doesn't organize things in modules exclusively. There is a higher-level unit called environment that groups and contains the modules. An environment mainly consists of:

  • One or more site manifest files

  • A modules directory

  • An optional environment.conf configuration file

When the master compiles the manifest for a node, it uses exactly one environment for this task. As described in Chapter 2, The Master and Its Agents, it always starts in manifests/*.pp, which form the environment's site manifest. Before we take a look at how this works in practice, let's see an example environment directory:

/opt/puppetlabs/code/environments
  production
    environment.conf
    manifests
      site.pp
      nodes.pp
    modules
      my_app
      ntp

The environment.conf file can customize the environment. Normally, Puppet uses site.pp and the other files in the manifests directory. To make Puppet read all the pp files in another directory, set the manifest option in environment...

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