We've been having DIY visualization sessions on Puppet and sysadmin related topics and we wanted to share some of them with you. We had a lot of fun doing this, hope you'll enjoy this even a bit as much as we did! Let me introduce the characters involved in the first chapter: R10k is started […]
In the previous posts of this series I discussed the control repository and r10k. The last component in fattening the workflow is Git provider such as GitLab, GitHub or Bitbucket. Nowadays all of them are reasonable choices for storing private Git modules, which Puppet control repositories and site-specific modules tend to be. One of the […]
In the previous post I discussed the control repository structure. In this post I'll talk about r10k. That tool is used for deploying control repository branches into matching Puppet environments on the Puppet server. Installing r10k is very straightforward with the bundled gem: After this you'll need a settings file for r10k, /etc/puppetlabs/r10k/r10k.yaml: Several requirements […]
If editing Puppet code and Hiera directly with puppetmaster feels too easy, you can complicate the Puppet workflow as much you like by adding more components to the palette. Adding the so called control repository and r10k to Puppet environment maintenance instantly adds several phases to your initially simple workflow. There are also benefits that […]
NOTE: this article is somewhat outdated. Please refer to Serverless Puppet with control repo, Hiera, roles and profiles and Puppet Bolt instead. Puppet Bolt is a designed to be an orchestration tool, but it can be used for configuration management as well. For example you may have a small environment of handful of nodes where […]
Packer is an excellent tool for automating creation of machine images such as AWS AMIs or Docker container images. This is particularly useful when you need to scale up by spinning up instances on-demand or if you want to package software that is challenging to manage with a configuration management system. It is also extremely […]
As discussed in the introductory post one of the use-cases for Puppet Bolt is orchestration - running actions on multiple targets in a certain order, possibly using results of actions or data from some targets on other targets. Orchestration with Bolt plans is quite easy: you just create a plan with multiple TargetSpec parameters, each […]
NOTE: this article is somewhat outdated. Please refer to Serverless Puppet with control repo, Hiera, roles and profiles and Puppet Bolt instead. Puppet Bolt is an orchestration tool similar to Ansible. It is suitable for multiple use-cases: Running ad hoc commands on target nodes. We use this approach for testing Puppet feature branches before approving […]
It seems every other organization is using Jenkins these days. Jenkins is a continuous integration and continuous delivery server that can be used to automate building, testing, and delivering or deploying software. Many organizations also use Puppet for their configuration management needs. Puppet is, if not the de facto configuration management solution, at least one of the […]
This translated from the original Finnish article that is available here. The Augeas resource in Puppet allows one to manage parts of a complex configuration file instead of managing the whole file using a template or a static file. For trivial cases stdlib's file_line resource may be sufficient. While use of templates or static files […]
In the Puppet module rspec testing with PDK blog post I covered the procedure of creating and running puppet-rspec tests with PDK. This blog post will go more in-depth to that topic, in particular describe and context which you see in all puppet-rspec tests. When looking at the puppet-rspec test syntax the first time it […]
Fabric is a Python library for executing shell commands remotely over SSH in serial or parallel mode. I used Fabric 1 for years and it was - and still is - an excellent tool. While Fabric's use-cases overlap somewhat with those of Ansible, the difference is that Fabric is not state-based. In other words, in […]
If you've searched for instructions on how to write unit tests for Puppet code you've probably stumbled upon tutorials such as this that are of good quality, but suggest installing and using tools such as puppetlabs_rspec_helper directly. Or you may encounter references to rake, bundler, rvm and rspec. Then you start experimenting these tools, some […]
