Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing and configuring Hiera


From Puppet 3.x, Hiera has been officially integrated, and it is installed as a dependency when we install Puppet.

With Puppet 2.x, we need to install it separately, on the node where the Puppet Master resides—we need both the hiera and hiera-puppet packages, either via the OS native packaging system or via gem.

Note

gem is a package manager for Ruby, the language used to implement Puppet. It offers a unified format for self-contained packages commonly called gems. It's commonly used to install Puppet plugins. We'll see it multiple times throughout the book.

Hiera is not needed by the clients, unless they operate in a Masterless setup as Hiera is only used in the variables lookup during catalog compilation.

Its configuration file is hiera.yaml, its paths depends on how it is invoked:

  • When invoked from Puppet, the default path will be /etc/puppetlabs/code/hiera.yaml (/etc/puppet/hiera.yaml and /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml for Puppet Enterprise); this can be...