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

Testing Puppet code


It has been clear for years that there is the strong need to be able to test how changes to our Puppet code can affect our infrastructure.

The topic is quite large, complex, and, to be honest, not completely solved, but there are tools and methods than can help us in safely working with Puppet in a production environment.

We can test our code with these tools:

  • The command puppet parser validate, to check the syntax of our manifests

  • puppet-lint (http://puppet-lint.com/) to check that the style of our code conforms with the recommended style guide

  • rspec-puppet to test the catalog and the logic of our modules

  • rspec-puppet-system and Beaker, to test what happens when our catalog is applied to a real system

We can also follow some procedures and techniques, such as:

  • Using the --noop option to verify what would be the changes before applying them

  • Using Puppet environments to try our code on test systems before pushing it into production

  • Having canary nodes where Puppet is run and...