Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank
Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank

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 scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Debugging data lookups

As you can see from the preceding example, the data that contributes to the complete configuration of any module can be rather dispersed throughout the set of your data sources. It can be challenging to determine where the respective values are retrieved from for any given agent node. It can be frustrating to trace data sources to find out why a change at some level will not take effect for some of your agents.

To help make the process more transparent, Hiera comes with a command-line tool called hiera. Invoking it is simple:

root@puppetmaster # hiera -c /etc/puppetlabs/code/hiera.yaml demo::atoms  

It retrieves a given key using the specified configuration from hiera.yaml. Make sure that you use the same Hiera configuration as Puppet.

Of course, this can only work sensibly if Hiera selects the same data sources as the compiler, which uses fact values to...