Introduction

In this chapter, we will cover how to deploy Puppet in a centralized and decentralized manner. With each approach, we'll see a combination of best practices, my personal experience, and community solutions.

We'll configure and use both PuppetDB and Hiera. PuppetDB is used with exported resources, which we will cover in Chapter 5, Users and Virtual Resources. Hiera is used to separate variable data from Puppet code.

Finally, I'll introduce Git and see how to use Git to organize our code and our infrastructure.

Because Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, and CentOS, differ in the specific details of package names, configuration file paths, and many other things, I have decided that for reasons of space and clarity the best approach for this book is to pick one distribution (Debian 7 named as Wheezy) and stick to that. However, Puppet runs on most popular operating systems, so you should have very little trouble adapting the recipes to your own favorite OS and distribution.

At the time of writing, Puppet 3.7.2 is the latest stable version available, this is the version of Puppet used in the book. The syntax of Puppet commands changes often, so be aware that while older versions of Puppet are still perfectly usable, they may not support all of the features and syntax described in this book. As we saw in Chapter 1, Puppet Language and Style, the future parser showcases features of the language scheduled to become default in Version 4 of Puppet.