Mastering Puppet

Thomas Uphill

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781783982189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Operating Systems
• Index: Computer Science

In Detail

Puppet is a configuration management system written for system administrators to manage a large number of systems efficiently and help maintain order.

Mastering Puppetdeals with the issues faced in larger deployments such as scaling and duplicate resource definitions. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your organization and keep everyone working. The concepts presented can be adapted to suit any size organization. This book starts with setting up and installing Puppet in your organization and then moves on to implementing version control in Puppet, creating custom modules, and extending your Puppet infrastructure. Finally, you will learn tips and tricks that are useful when troubleshooting Puppet and the best practices to make you a pro.

Approach

Presented in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial format and packed with examples, this book will lead you through making the best out of Puppet in an enterprise environment.

Who this book is for

If you are a system administrator or developer who has used Puppet in production and are looking for ways to easily use Puppet in an enterprise environment, this book is for you. This book assumes an intermediate knowledge of Puppet and is intended for those writing modules or deploying Puppet in an enterprise environment.

Mastering Puppet

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Table of Contents

Mastering Puppet

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Dealing with Load/Scale

Divide and conquer

Puppet with passenger

Splitting up the workload

Certificate signing

Reporting

Storeconfigs

Catalog compilation

Keeping the code consistent

Rsync

NFS

Clustered filesystem

Git

One more split

One last split or maybe a few more

Conquer by dividing

Creating an rpm

Creating the YUM repository

Summary

2. Organizing Your Nodes and Data

Getting started

Organizing the nodes with ENC

A simple example

Hostname strategy

Modified ENC using hostname strategy

LDAP backend

OpenLDAP configuration

Hiera

Configuring hiera

Using hiera_include

Summary

3. Git and Environments

Environments

Environments and hiera

Multiple hierarchies

Single hierarchy for all environments

Dynamic environments

Git

Why Git?

A simple Git workflow

Git Hooks

Using post-receive to set up environments

Puppet-sync

Playing nice with other developers

Not playing nice with others

Git for everyone

Summary

4. Public Modules

Getting modules

Using GitHub for public modules

Modules from the Forge

Using librarian

Using r10k

Using modules

concat

inifile

firewall

lvm

stdlib

Summary

5. Custom Facts and Modules

Module manifest files

Module files and templates

Naming a module

Creating modules with a Puppet module

Comments in modules

Multiple definitions

Custom facts

Creating custom facts

Creating a custom fact for use in hiera

Summary

6. Custom Types

Parameterized classes

Defined types

Types and providers

Creating a new type

Summary

7. Reporting and Orchestration

Turning on reporting

Syslog

Store

IRC

Foreman

Installing Foreman

Attaching Foreman to Puppet

Using Foreman

Puppet Dashboard

Using passenger with Dashboard

Linking Dashboard to Puppet

Processing reports

mcollective

Installing activemq

Configuring nodes to use activemq

Connecting a client to activemq

Using mcollective

Summary

8. Exported Resources

Configuring puppetdb – using the forge module

Manually installing puppetdb

Installing Puppet and puppetdb

Installing and configuring PostgreSQL

Configuring puppetdb to use PostgreSQL

Configuring Puppet to use puppetdb

Exported resource concepts

Declaring exported resources

Collecting exported resources

Simple example: a host entry

Resource tags

Exported SSH keys

sshkey collection for laptops

Putting it all together

Summary

9. Roles and Profiles

Design pattern

Creating an example CDN role

Creating a sub-CDN role

Dealing with exceptions

Summary

10. Troubleshooting

Connectivity issues

Catalog failures

Full trace of a catalog compile

The classes.txt file

Debugging

Personal and bugfix branches

Echo statements

Scope

Profiling and summarizing

Summary

Index

Mastering Puppet

Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: July 2014

Production reference: 1090714

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78398-218-9

www.packtpub.com

Cover image by Gagandeep Sharma (<[email protected]>)

Credits

Author

Thomas Uphill

Reviewers

Ugo Bellavance

C. N. A. Corrêa

Jeroen Hooyberghs

Johan De Wit

Commissioning Editor

Edward Gordon

Acquisition Editor

Meeta Rajani

Content Development Editor

Sharvari Tawde

Technical Editors

Veena Pagare

Anand Singh

Copy Editors

Sarang Chari

Mradula Hegde

Project Coordinator

Danuta Jones

Proofreaders

Faye Coulman

Maria Gould

Indexers

Mariammal Chettiyar

Tejal Soni

Priya Subramani

Graphics

Sheetal Aute

Ronak Dhruv

Production Coordinator

Shantanu Zagade

Cover Work

Shantanu Zagade

About the Author

Thomas Uphill is an RHCA who has been using Puppet since version 0.24. He has been a system administrator for nearly 20 years, more than 10 of which have been with Red Hat Linux and its derivatives. He has presented tutorials on Puppet at LOPSA-East and has spoken at PuppetConf 2013. He enjoys teaching others how to use Puppet to automate as much system administration tasks as possible. When he's not at the Seattle Puppet Meetup, you can find him at http://ramblings.narrabilis.com.

I am very thankful to my friend and colleague Joško Plazonić for introducing me to Puppet and getting me started on this journey. I would like to thank my wife Priya Fernandes for putting up with the long nights and weekends it took to finish this book. Thanks to Nate Tade for his encouragement while I worked on this book, the rest ...

Table of contents

• Mastering Puppet