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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Puppet 4 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Upgrading to Puppet 4


Let's first look at how users of the older Puppet 3 series can approach the update.

Tip

Instead of upgrading your Puppet Master machine, consider setting up a new server in parallel and migrating the service carefully. This has some advantages. For example, rolling back in case of problems is quite easy.

The new Puppet 4 version can be installed in several ways:

  1. Using the Puppet Labs repositories, which will remove older Puppet packages:

    This method means a hard cut without testing in advance, which is not recommended. The update to Puppet 4 should only take place after in-depth testing of your Puppet manifest code.

  2. Installing as the Ruby gem extension or from tarball

    This approach requires a separate Ruby 2.1 installation, which is not available on most modern Linux distributions.

  3. Update to Puppet 3.8, enable and migrate to the environment path settings, and enable the future parser only on a special testing environment:

    The latter solution is the smartest and most backward...