The Puppet Show

Now, we can get some stuff done since we are able to create virtual boxes on the fly and destroy them whenever we messed them up … and we will mess them up pretty often I suppose.

In the last blog post we have installed Puppet. This will help us to improve our system configurations step-by-step and building lots of different boxes for different purposes. Most of all, our boxes will be consistent.

Don’t act like a machine #

Not that long ago, I had to look after some test servers of a company that used them for manual testing. The boxes themselves basically had the same layout, only the versions of some software components were different. Basically … We speak about 8 virtual machines that were created, configured and maintained 100% manually. Everyday there were different issues, or let’s say inconsistencies. The boxes degraded in quality over time. Setting up new boxes always resulted in missing components, or components with wrong versions or components that have not properly been configured. Yes, it was a checklist based approach. Follow checklist A to create the machine, then this checklist B to configure it, and so on.

In my experience the following holds true:

human + checklist = automation

Some people are afraid of that. Especially in times of economic recessions and lay-offs. My take-away: Never follow any checklists, be the one who knows how to automate processes to stay in the market.

Let’s get technical again.

“Hello World” using Puppet #

Luckily I have found the following tutorial at Bitfield Consulting. It helped a lot with building a simple puppet configuration that prints “Hello Puppet”. This configuration will be the starting point for more complex configurations in the future. For now, we just need to check if the basic mechanism works.

I have everything committed to GitHub. Execute the following to get it:

{% highlight none %} git clone [email protected]:tobias-wissmueller/hello_puppet.git {% endhighlight %}

Now, go into the directory, add the box and power it up.

{% highlight none %} cd hello_puppet vagrant box add hello_puppet_box <path_to_your_box>/package.box chmod 0600 id_rsa.vagrant vagrant up {% endhighlight %}

Everything worked if you get the screen above. Vagrant automatically executed puppet to provision a module that prints “Hello Puppet!” to the console.

So cool! But not really useful. ;-)

In the future we are going to extend that. We will be able to build virtual machines for different purposes in a purely automated fashion. The basis is our basic vagrant box that we will provision with different software configurations as we need them.

And again: Everything fully automated and fully versioned. We are not going for anything less!

Done for today!