Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide

Start from scratch with the Puppet configuration management system, and learn how to fully utilize Puppet through simple, practical examples

Overview

• Shows you step-by-step how to install Puppet and start managing your systems with simple examples
• Every aspect of Puppet is explained in detail so that you really understand what you’re doing.
• Gets you up and running immediately, from installation to using Puppet for practical tasks in a matter of minutes.
• Written in a clear, friendly, jargon-free style which doesn’t assume any previous knowledge and explains things in practical terms

In Detail

Everyone’s talking about Puppet, the open-source DevOps technology that lets you automate your server setups and manage websites, databases, and desktops. Puppet can build new servers in seconds, keep your systems constantly up to date, and automate daily maintenance tasks.

“Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide” gets you up and running with Puppet straight away, with complete real world examples. Each chapter builds your skills, adding new Puppet features, always with a practical focus. You’ll learn everything you need to manage your whole infrastructure with Puppet.

“Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide” takes you from complete beginner to confident Puppet user, through a series of clear, simple examples, with full explanations at every stage.

Through a series of worked examples introducing Puppet to a fictional web company, you’ll learn how to manage every aspect of your server setup. Switching to Puppet needn’t be a big, long-term project; this book will show you how to start by bringing one small part of your systems under Puppet control and, little by little, building to the point where Puppet is managing your whole infrastructure.

Presented in an easy-to-read guide to learning Puppet from scratch, this book explains simply and clearly all you need to know to use this essential IT power tool, all the time applying these solutions to real-world scenarios.

What you will learn from this book

• Installing and configuring your Puppet environment.
• Running Puppet on multiple servers.
• Deploy configuration files and templates for lightning-fast installations.
• Creating and monitoring reports and information.
• Managing user accounts, security, access control, and scheduled jobs.
• Best practices for organizing your Puppet code using Git.

Approach

Presented in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial format, Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide will lead you through the basics of setting up your Puppet server with plenty of screenshots and real-world solutions.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for system administrators and developers, and anyone else who needs to manage computer systems. You will need to be able to edit text files and run a few commands on the command line, but otherwise no system administration or programming experience is required.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducton to Puppet
Chapter 2: First steps with Puppet
Chapter 3: Packages, Files, and Services
Chapter 4: Managing Puppet with Git
Chapter 5: Managing users
Chapter 6: Tasks and templates
Chapter 7: Defnitons and Classes
Chapter 8: Expressions and Logic
Chapter 9: Reportng and troubleshootng
Chapter 10: Moving on Up