The Puppet Forge is a website run by Puppet Labs. It was born as a methodology for system administrators and developers using Puppet to share their Puppet modules with others. It can be found at http://forge.puppetlabs.com.

Over the years, the Forge has seen many improvements, in both its function as well as the number of modules available.

At the time of writing this book, there are more than 3,000 modules on the Forge. These modules include configuration of everything from MySQL to the Apache web server. Like many community projects, however, the quality and support of these modules varies.

In the early days of the Forge, it was like the wild west. Many modules were posted, but there were very lax standards on quality, and it was unknown whether a given module would work on your OS.

On the quality front, the community and Puppet Labs have done a great job at encouraging the community to adapt a set of standards and design patterns around modules. This allows things such as...