Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system that automates all your IT configurations, giving you control of managing each node. Puppet 5 Cookbook will take you through Puppet's latest and most advanced features, including Docker containers, Hiera, and AWS Cloud Orchestration. Updated with the latest advancements and best practices, this book delves into various aspects of writing good Puppet code, which includes using Puppet community style, checking your manifests with puppet-lint, and learning community best practices with an emphasis on real-world implementation. You will learn to set up, install, and create your first manifests with version control, and also learn about various sysadmin tasks, including managing configuration files, using Augeas, and generating files from snippets and templates. As the book progresses, you'll explore virtual resources and use Puppet's resource scheduling and auditing features. In the concluding chapters, you'll walk through managing applications and writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers. By the end of this book, you will have learned to report, log, and debug your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Configuring Hiera


Hiera is an information repository for Puppet. Using Hiera, you can have a hierarchical categorization of data about your nodes that is maintained outside of your manifests. This is very useful for sharing code and dealing with exceptions that will creep into any Puppet deployment. 

At the time of writing, the current release of Hiera is version 3.4.2, and to make things extra confusing, this version includes Hiera5. Hiera configuration versions do not match the release of Hiera itself. Originally Hiera was just known as Hiera, then incompatible settings were introduced when Puppet4 was released. The Hiera configuration that supported Puppet4 was named Hiera4; now with Puppet5, we have Hiera5, but the actual version number of Hiera is still only 3.x. 

Hiera5 introduces to Hiera the ability to run custom puppet functions to lookup information. Hiera5 in conjunction with Puppet5 supports the ability to have custom hiera look up data within Puppet modules. We'll see more of...