Second Edition
Table of Contents
Divide and conquer 1
Certificate signing 2
Reporting 2
Storeconfigs 2
Catalog compilation 2
puppetserver 3
Building a Puppet master 3
Certificates 5
systemd 6
Creating a load balancer 7
Keeping the code consistent 14
One more split 17
One last split or maybe a few more 18
Conquer by dividing 21
Creating an rpm 22
Using Puppet resource to configure cron 24
Creating the yum repository 25
Summary 27
Getting started 29
Organizing the nodes with an ENC 29
A simple example 30
Hostname strategy 33
Modified ENC using hostname strategy 35
LDAP backend 39
OpenLDAP configuration 39
Hiera 44
Configuring Hiera 45
Using hiera_include 48
Summary 54
Environments 55
Environments and Hiera 58
Multiple hierarchies 58
Single hierarchy for all environments 60
Directory environments 61
Git 64
Why Git? 65
A simple Git workflow 66
Git hooks 75
Using post-receive to set up environments 76
Puppet-sync 79
Using Git hooks to play nice with other developers 82
Not playing nice with others via Git hooks 85
Git for everyone 89
Summary 92
Getting modules 93
Using GitHub for public modules 93
Updating the local repository 95
Modules from the Forge 96
Using Librarian 98
Using r10k 100
Using Puppet-supported modules 106
concat 106
inifile 112
firewall 117
Logical volume manager 121
Standard library 124
Summary 126
Module manifest files 128
Module files and templates 131
Naming a module 132
Creating modules with a Puppet module 133
Comments in modules 135
Multiple definitions 138
Custom facts 141
Creating custom facts 141
Creating a custom fact for use in Hiera 148
CFacter 150
Summary 151
Parameterized classes 153
Data types 154
Defined types 155
Types and providers 166
Creating a new type 167
Summary 174
Turning on reporting 175
Store 176
Logback 177
Internet relay chat 177
Foreman 182
Installing Foreman 182
Attaching Foreman to Puppet 183
Using Foreman 185
Puppet GUIs 187
mcollective 187
Installing ActiveMQ 189
Configuring nodes to use ActiveMQ 192
Connecting a client to ActiveMQ 195
Using mcollective 198
Ansible 199
Summary 199
Configuring PuppetDB – using the Forge module 201
Manually installing PuppetDB 205
Installing Puppet and PuppetDB 205
Installing and configuring PostgreSQL 206
Configuring puppetdb to use PostgreSQL 207
Configuring Puppet to use PuppetDB 208
Exported resource concepts 209
Declaring exported resources 210
Collecting exported resources 210
Simple example – a host entry 210
Resource tags 212
Exported SSH keys 213
sshkey collection for laptops 214
Putting it all together 217
Summary 226
Design pattern 227
Creating an example CDN role 228
Creating a sub-CDN role 232
Dealing with exceptions 234
Summary 235
Connectivity issues 238
Catalog failures 241
Full trace on a catalog compilation 244
The classes.txt file 245
Debugging 246
Personal and bugfix branches 247
Echo statements 247
Scope 248
Profiling and summarizing 249
Summary 250
Index 251
Preface
The complexity of your installation will increase with the number of nodes in your organization. Working on a small deployment with a few developers is much simpler than working on a large installation with many developers. Mastering Puppet Second Edition deals with the issues faced by larger deployments, such as scaling and versioning. This book will show you how to fit Puppet into your organization and keep everyone working. The concepts presented can be adopted to suit any size organization.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Dealing with Load/Scale, will show you how to scale your Puppet infrastructure as your node count increases.
Chapter 2, Organizing Your Nodes and Data, is where we show different methods of applying modules to nodes. We look at Hiera and external node classifiers (ENCs).
Chapter 3, Git and Environments, introduces Git and how to use Git as an integral component of your Puppet infrastructure.
Chapter 4, Public Modules, shows how to use Puppet Forge as a source of modules and how to use several popular modules in your organization.
Chapter 5, Custom Facts and Modules, is where we extend Puppet with custom facts and start writing our own modules.
Chapter 6, Custom Types, is where we introduce defined types and show how to extend the Puppet language with our own custom types and providers.
Chapter 7, Reporting and Orchestration, is where we configure reporting to help track down errors in our Puppet deployments.
Chapter 8, Exported Resources, explains how useful it is to have resources on one node that can be applied to other nodes in your organization.
Chapter 9, Roles and Profiles, shows a popular design pattern in Puppet node deployments. Here we present the concept and show example usage.
Chapter 10, Troubleshooting, is where we show some common errors found in Puppet deployments, as well as possible solutions.
What you need for this book
All the examples in this book were written and tested using an Enterprise Linux 7 derived installation, such as CentOS 7, Scientific Linux 7, or Springdale Linux 7. Additional repositories used were EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux), the Software Collections (SCL) repository, the Foreman repository, and the Puppet Labs repository. The version of Puppet used was the latest 4.2 series at the time of writing .
Who this book is for
This book is for those who have intermediate knowledge of Puppet and are looking to deploy it in their environment. Some idea of how to write simple modules for configuration management with Puppet is a prerequisite for this book.
