What this book covers

Chapter 1, Puppet Infrastructure introduces some key techniques for managing your Puppet server and manifests, including version control, automated deployment, file serving, pre-signing and autosigning certificates, scaling with Passenger, and a distributed decentralized Puppet architecture using Git.

Chapter 2, Monitoring, Reporting, and Troubleshooting covers ways that Puppet can report information about what it's doing, and the status of your systems. This includes graphical and e-mail reports, log and debug messages, dependency graphing, testing and dry-running your manifests, using tags, run stages, and environments, and a guide to some of Puppet's more common error messages.

Chapter 3, Puppet Language and Style will show you examples of good programming style in Puppet and language constructs that can help you keep your code concise and readable, including conditionals, selectors, case statements, arrays, and regular expressions.

Chapter 4, Writing Better Manifests takes you through structuring your Puppet manifests using node and class inheritance, resource dependencies, and parameterized classes. You'll also see how to get data in and out of Puppet from the environment using CSV files and shell scripts.

Chapter 5, Working with Files and Packages covers powerful techniques for managing config files, including ERB templates, generating files from snippets, and using the Augeas tool. You'll also see how to use Puppet to install packages from APT repositories, and how to set up your own APT and Gem repositories.

Chapter 6, Users and Virtual Resources explains how virtual resources 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 7, Applications focuses on some specific applications that you may need to manage with Puppet, including complete recipes for Apache and Nginx, MySQL, Drupal, and Rails.

Chapter 8, Servers and Cloud Infrastructure extends the power of Puppet to managing virtual machines, both in the cloud and on your desktop, with recipes for Vagrant and EC2 instances. It also shows you how to set up a Nagios monitoring server, load balancing with HAProxy, firewalls with iptables, network filesystems with NFS, and high-availability services with Heartbeat.

Chapter 9, External Tools and the Puppet Ecosystem looks at the tools that have grown up around Puppet and help you integrate it with the rest of your network, including Puppet Dashboard, Foreman, and MCollective. It also introduces you to some advanced topics including writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers.