Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By : Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate
Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By: Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language written for and by system administrators to manage a large number of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drift. The core topics this book addresses are Puppet's latest features and mastering Puppet Enterprise. You will begin by writing a new Puppet module, gaining an understanding of the guidelines and style of the Puppet community. Following on from this, you will take advantage of the roles and profiles pattern, and you will learn how to structure your code. Next, you will learn how to extend Puppet and write custom facts, functions, types, and providers in Ruby, and also use the new features of Hiera 5. You will also learn how to configure the new Code Manager component, and how to ensure code is automatically deployed to (multiple) Puppet servers. Next, you will learn how to integrate Puppet with Jenkins and Git to build an effective workflow for multiple teams, and use the new Puppet Tasks feature and the latest Puppet Orchestrator language extensions. Finally, you will learn how to scale and troubleshoot Puppet. By the end of the book, you will be able to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Using Puppet Forge


It maybe goes without saying that there's no reason to reinvent the wheel when you are authoring your Puppet modules. A few minutes in Puppet Forge (https://forge.puppet.com) can really save you days and days of editing. There are, at the time of writing, more than 5,000 Forge modules, so it makes a great deal of sense to leverage all that hard work done by the Puppet community. Search the Forge first for that bit of software; it's more than likely that something already exists.

In my experience, I have found there is often something that almost does the job. Maybe there's a module (usually an unsupported and unapproved one) that maybe, for example, performs the management for the software you require, but it's only for Ubuntu, and you're using Red Hat. It's usually a better approach to fork that module, whatever shape it's in, and work on that, rather than start from scratch.