Inspecting the configuration settings

All the customization of the master's parameters can be made in the puppet.conf file. The operating system packages ship with some settings that are deemed sensible by the respective maintainers. Apart from these explicit settings, Puppet relies on defaults that are either built-in or derived from the environment (details on how this works follow in the Chapter 3, A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers):

root@puppetmaster # puppet master --configprint manifest
/etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/production/manifests

Most users will want to rely on these defaults for as many settings as possible. This is possible without any drawbacks because Puppet makes all settings fully transparent using the --configprint parameter. For example, you can find out where the master manifest files are located.

To get an overview of all available settings and their values, use the following command:

root@puppetmaster# puppet master --configprint all | less  

While this command is especially useful on the master side, the same introspection is available for puppet apply and puppet agent.

Setting specific configuration entries is possible with the puppet config command:

root@puppetmaster # puppet config set –-section main certname puppetmaster.example.net