What this book covers

You'll find the following chapters in this book:

Chapter 1, Puppet Infrastructure, shows how to set up Puppet for the first time, including instructions on installing Puppet, creating your first manifests, using version control with Puppet, building a distributed Puppet architecture based on Git, writing a script to apply Puppet manifests, running Puppet automatically, using Rake to bootstrap machines and deploy changes, and using Git hooks to automatically syntax-check your manifests.

Chapter 2, Puppet Language and Style, covers aspects of writing good Puppet code, including using Puppet community style, checking your manifests with puppet-lint, structuring your manifests with modules, using standard naming and style conventions, using inline templates, using iteration, conditional statements, and regular expressions, using selectors and case statements, and string operations.

Chapter 3, Writing Better Manifests, goes into detail on specific features of Puppet that you can use to improve your code quality and usability, including arrays, definitions, ordering your resources with dependencies, inheriting from nodes and classes, passing parameters to classes, overriding parameters, reading information from the environment, writing reusable manifests, and using tags and run stages.

Chapter 4, Working with Files and Packages, deals with some of the most common sysadmin tasks, including managing config files, using Augeas, generating files from snippets and templates, managing third-party package repositories, using GnuPG to encrypt secret data in Puppet, and building packages from source.

Chapter 5, Users and Virtual Resources, explains what virtual resources are and how they can help you manage different combinations of users and packages on different machines, and shows you how to use Puppet's resource scheduling and auditing features.

Chapter 6, Applications, focuses on some specific applications that you may need to manage with Puppet, including complete recipes for Apache and Nginx, MySQL, and Ruby.

Chapter 7, Servers and Cloud Infrastructure, extends the power of Puppet to manage virtual machines, both on the cloud and on your desktop, with recipes for Vagrant and EC2 instances. It also shows you how to set up load balancing with HAProxy, firewalls with iptables, network filesystems with NFS, and high-availability services with Heartbeat.

Chapter 8, External Tools and the Puppet Ecosystem, looks at some of the tools that have grown up around Puppet, including Hiera, Facter, and rspec-puppet. It also introduces you to some advanced topics including writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers.

Chapter 9, Monitoring, Reporting, and Troubleshooting, covers ways that Puppet can report information about what it's doing, and the status of your system. This includes reports, log, and debug messages, dependency graphing, testing and dry-running your manifests, and a guide to some of Puppet's more common error messages.