A Boilerplate Comparison: Puppet
Introduction
Here we cover the steps for deploying a package to a puppet agent/node. Like with chef, we assume a working installation.
Though I must take the opportunity to comment that the installation process for puppet was ridiculously easy.
The ridiculously easy way
Package installation can be performed completely through the console, e.g. web ui, for puppet. To do so, you go to https://puppetmaster.me.com and click 'Live Management' -> Advanced Tasks -> package tasks -> Install. Type in the package name you wish to install and click 'Run'.
That's it. Done.
The not quite ridiculously easy way
That seems almost too trivial. It's nice that the trivial tasks are trivial to perform, but let's take a closer look at what it takes to roll your own task and deploy it. It's more representative of how a sysadmin will interact with the framework and seems more fair to chef.
Creating a module from scratch
Puppet, like chef, can generate a module template. Puppet is very community centric and sharing of modules is the default. As such, the module template asks you to prepend your Puppet Forge username as it is the best practice naming convention for shared modules. Like in our previous walk through with chef, we're going to write a package for installing tmux.
Create the package
% puppet module generate username-tmux
You're rewarded with a directory like
Modulefile README manifests spec tests
Edit Modulefile
You should always edit the modulefile and enter pertinent information such as version, license, description, etc.
Create tmux class
The business is in the init.pp file, we edit that and add our package requirement.
class tmux { package{"tmux": } }
Add class to a node
Finally, to apply the role to a node you add it to the nodes definition in the site.pp file. This isn't a hard, fast rule. Puppet can pull node configuration from external sources. Puppet Enterprise console provides this and so you could use the web frontend to add the class to your list in console and then apply it to a group. You could also provide your own backend.
However, the "basic" basic, out the box puppet involves editing the site.pp, so we&squot;ll add it to the default node here
node default {
class {'tmux':}
}
We also commit the package to our repository.
% git add modules/username-tmux manifests/site.pp
% git commit modules/username-tmux manifests/site.pp -m "added tmux module"
% git push origin master
Comments
If you noticed, we didn't cover how you upload your module and manifest like we did in the Chef article. That's because puppet doesn't have a management tool for interacting with the puppet master like the knife tool. Deployment is left up to the administrator. Some common methods are using cap deploy, commit hooks, or pulling files down in a cron from the repo.
Comments !