Summary

In this chapter, we've seen how a manifest is made up of Puppet resources. You've learned how to use Puppet's file resource to create and modify files, how to install packages using the package resource, and how to manage services with the service resource. We've looked at the common package-file-service pattern and seen how to use the notify attribute on a resource to send a message to another resource indicating that its configuration has been updated. We've covered the use of the require attribute to make dependencies between resources explicit, when necessary.

You've also learned to use puppet resource to inspect the current state of the system according to Puppet, and puppet describe to get command-line help on all Puppet resources. To check what Puppet would change on the system without actually changing it, we've introduced the --noop and --show_diff options to puppet apply.

In the next chapter, we'll see how to use the version control tool Git to keep track of your manifests, we'll get an introduction to fundamental Git concepts, such as the repo and the commit, and you'll learn how to distribute your code to each of the servers you're going to manage with Puppet.