Puppet

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.

Puppet's simple declarative specification language provides powerful classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency and prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly.

Puppet is a system configuration tool. Puppet project has a library for managing the system, a language for specifying the configuration you want, and a set of clients and servers for communicating the configuration and other information.

The library is entirely responsible for all action, and the language is entirely responsible for expressing configuration choices.

Everything is developed so that the language operations can take place centrally on a single server (or bank of servers), and all library operations will take place on each individual client. Thus, there is a clear demarcation between language operations and library operations, as this document will mention.

Setup

The vast majority of Puppet architectures will look like a star, with a central server running puppetmasterd, and each client node running puppetd, contacting that central server.

Your central manifest, which contains the configuration for all of your nodes, needs to be on the central server, most likely at /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp.

Start the puppetmasterd daemon, and then tell your clients to contact that server by specifying -s < servername > as arguments to puppetd, replacing "< servername >" with the name of the server. Alternatively, puppetd defaults to looking for a server named "puppet", so you can just create a CNAME for your server, so that it answers to "puppet".

It is a good idea to run both the server and client in verbose mode, enabled with the -v flag, until you are sure everything is working. As each new client connects, you will need to run puppetca --list to list the certificates waiting to be signed, and then puppetca --sign < name >, replacing "< name >" with the name of the client whose certificate you want to sign. You can turn on autosigning by creating /etc/puppet/autosign.conf and put the hosts, domains, or IP addresses or ranges that you want to sign in there.

Installation:

Run 'ruby install.rb' or add the 'lib/' directory to your RUBYLIB path.

After that, you should be able to go into test/ and run ./test, or run 'bin/puppet' on whichever puppet config files you want.

What is new in this release:

• 7113448 (#4762) Ensure that clients on the moon can successfully connect.
• c8835ad Add document outlining preferred contribution methods
• ea0f2bf Revert "Merge branch 'vcsrepo'"
• 94f0b93 (#8704) Give better errors for invalid fileserver.conf
• 023d959 (#8690) Accept 'global' options in Puppet Faces
• c315da0 Fix #1886 - Add node cleanup capability
• 7e6fc0d Deprecate RestAuthConfig#allowed? in favor of #check_authorization
• 6401dfe Fix #6026 - security file should support inline comments
• 0c385f1 Fix #5010 - Allow leading whitespace in auth.conf
• 8da0486 Fix #5777 - rule interpolation broke auth.conf CIDR rules
• 1d4acb5 maint: Suggest where to start troubleshooting SSL error message
• fb2ffd6 (#8596) Detect resource alias conflicts when titles do not match
• 778127d maint: Fix cert app to print help and exit if no subcommand
• 0366b18 (#7293) Set default format for SSL-related faces.
• 89c021c (#8418) Fix inspect app to have the correct run_mode
• 3165364 maint: Adding logging to include environment when source fails
• f484851 maint: Add debug logging when the master receives a report
• 10e05ad (#7266) Move Certificate option validation into face.
• ae36003 (#7290) Update indirected Faces to avoid unknown options.
• 82e5fa9 (#8561, #7290) Implement the option contract fully.
• 77441be (#8561) Unify validation and modification of action arguments.
• 69b4e70 (#7290) Fail on unknown options.
• 6bec2df (#8561) Use canonical names for options to actions.
• 532c4f3 (#7184) Load the core of obsolete versions of Faces.
• 2cd3bc4 (#7184) Find actions bound to other versions of Faces.
• 1e0655e (#7184) Centralize "find action for face" into Puppet::Face
• 0396611 maint: better error reporting when test fails
• 395c174 (#7123) Make `find` the default action...
• fd6a653 (#7123) Support runtime setting of 'default' on actions.
• b75b1c1 (#6787) Add `default_to` for options.
• c830ab0 (#6789) Port SSL::CertificateAuthority::Interface to a Face
• cc311ad maint: SSL::Inventory.serial should report missing names.
• 72abe6c (#7204) Consolidate Semantic Versioning code.
• d02000b (#8401) Document that --detailed-exitcodes is a bitmask
• c4848d2 maint: Fix documentation link for fileserver configuration
• b268fb3 (#7144) Update Settings#writesub to convert mode to Fixnum
• b82f29c (#7699) Help command should only list options once
• 4a2f22c (maint) Fix platform dection for RHEL
• 45b3908 (#4142) Fix module check not to fail when empty metadata.json
• ae3ef42 (#7699) - Help should only show options once
• 5826f73 (#8032) Add containment to create_resources
• f6882d6 (#8147) Change default reporturl to match newer Dashboard versions
• 111a4b5 (#6857) Password disclosure when changing a user's password
• 99330fa (#7224) Reword 'hostname was not match' error message
• 1d867b0 (#7224) Add a helper to Puppet::SSL::Certificate to retrieve
• alternate names
• 98ba407 (#7127) Stop puppet if a prerun command fails
• caca469 (#4416) Ensure types are providified after reloading
• 413b136 (#4416) Always remove old provider before recreating it
• 3f0dbb5 (#650) Allow symlinks for configuration directories
• 1c70f0c (#2128) Add support for setting node name based on a fact
• c629958 (#2128) Get facts before retrieving catalog
• cd4fe14 (#2128) Add the ability to specify a node name
• c02126d (#5966) Add support for hostname regular expressions in auth.conf
• 75e2764 (#5318) Always notice changes to manifests when compiling.
• 107b38a maint: Fix pacman provider to work with Ruby 1.9
• 90eb937 (#7139) Accept '/' as a valid path in filesets

What is new in version 0.25.0:

• Most of the changes in this release are internal refactoring rather than behavioral.
• The principal change is the introduction of Indirected REST to replace XML-RPC as the underlying Puppet communications mechanism.
• Four new functions were added.
• Puppet now has the capability to compile a catalogue and output it in JSON from the Puppet master and the ability to apply a JSON configuration from the puppet binary.
• The concept of "thin" stored configurations was introduced.
• A binary called puppetqd that supports queuing for stored configurations was added.

What is new in version 0.24.8:

• Fixed #2077 - ralsh user broken on OSX
• Fixed #2004 - ssh_authorized_key fails if no target is defined
• Fixed #1629 - incorrect permissions on ssh_authorized_keys created files
• Fixed #2000 - No default specified for checksum
• Fixed #2026 - Red Hat ignoring stop method
• Added ext/dbfix.sql script - fixes common errors in stored configuration databases
• Fixed #1963 - Failing to read /proc/mounts for selinux kills file downloads
• Fixed #2025 - gentoo service provider handle only default init level
• Fixed #1910 - updated logcheck
• Fixed #1871 - Sensitive information leaked in log reports
• Fixed #1956 - Cleaned up variable names to be more sane, clarified error messages and fixed incorrect use of 'value' variable rather than 'member'.
• Fixed #1831 - Added sprintf function
• Fixed #1830 - Added regsubst function
• Updated up2date and service confines to add support for Oracle EL and VM
• Fixing #1948 and #1953 - augeas ins bug: wrong number of arguments (1 for 3)
• Fixing #944 - changing error message from warning to info - connection recycled
• Fixed #961 - puppetd creating too many/not closing TCP connections
• Fixed #1959 - Added column protection for environment schema migration
• Fixing #1869 - autoloaded files should never leak exceptions
• Fixing #1543 - Nagios parse errors no longer kill Puppet
• Fixed #1420 - nagios_serviceescalation not allowing host_name more than one type
• Fixed #1884 - Exported resources are marked as unexported when collected on the exporting host
• Fixed #1922 - Functions squash all arguments into a single hash
• Fixed #1538 - Yumrepo sets permissions wrongly on files in /etc/yum.repos.d
• Fixed #1936 - Added /* */ support to the vim file
• Fixed #1541 - nagios objects write files to clientbucket on every change
• Fixed #1542 - cannot purge nagios objects
• Fixing #1912 - gid still works with no 'should' value fixing ralsh issues
• Fixing the Rakefile to use 'git format-patch'
• Added README.rst file
• Enhancements to Stored Configuration performance
• Added Reductive Labs build library to tasks directory
• Fixed #1852 - Correct behaviour when no SELinux bindings
• Updated Red Hat spec file 0.24.7
• Fixed #1920 - Shadow password corruption

Requirements:

• Ruby