Standalone Puppet Reference Implementation

Table of Contents

1. Description
2. Development environment
   • Vagrant
3. Puppet
   • Preferred Programming Style
   • Node Configuration

Description

An example of a standalone Puppet deployment (masterless).

The following nodes are provisioned:

• Standard Operating Environment (SOE)
• Puppet Inventory and Management Console
  • PuppetDB
  • PuppetExplorer

The SOE demonstrates a Puppet configuration being applied to a node at reqular intervals and its catalog, facts, and reports being posted to an node inventory.

Development environment

• Puppet nodes implemented by CentOS Linux Virtual Machines
• Vagrant used to manage VMs and provision initial Puppet configuration
• puppet-lint gem installed on development host
  • invoked by IDE plugin
• bundler used to install Puppet gem on macOS development host
  • bundle config specific_platform true
  • bundle install --path vendor
  • echo 'vendor/ruby' >> .gitignore
  • bundle package

Vagrant

• Provisioning
  • Puppet 4 installed using shell provisioner
  • Node configured using Puppet Apply provisioner
    • Used defaults where possible
    • Puppet manifest, modules, and hiera configuration copied to VM
• Networking
  • Private Network
    • All instances on same subnet
  • A specific IP address is required to support NFS because DHCP won't work. Also, to prevent another VirtualBox Adapter being created the address assigned is in range of the DHCP server of VirtualBox Host-only Adapter.
  • Application ports also forwarded for convenience
• Synced Folders
  • NFS shared directories (Private Network required)
    • This seems to be the most reliable mechanism on macOS
  • Hiera data shared into VM via /vagrant Synced Folder
• Multi-machine example
  • Backed by VirtualBox and Digital Ocean
  • ssh ports overridden

Puppet

• Fact-based node classifier with example of logic-based classifier too.
• Roles and Profiles design pattern observed
• Third-party modules installed using 'puppet module install'
• Hiera configuration uses an absolute directory to allow the hiera CLI to work from any directory

Preferred Programming Style

• Interfacing with subclasses
  • Passing data via parameterized class declarations
    • Class declaration and contain function call
  • Puppet elements documented using Puppet Strings

Node configuration

• Ruby environment
  • chruby - manage ruby versions
  • ruby-install - install rubies
  • Bundler - manage gem installation
  • Rake - ruby tasks