What this book covers

Chapter 1, Writing Your First Manifests, is an introduction to the core concepts of Puppet, including a syntax tutorial. You will learn to write and use Puppet manifests within a few pages.

Chapter 2, The Master and Its Agents, is a quick how-to guide to setting up all the required components for a distributed Puppet infrastructure. In this chapter, you will learn to create the master and an agent, and set up puppetserver.

Chapter 3, A Peek under the Hood Facts, Types, and Providers, covers a summary of the core components that give Puppet its flexibility, as well as its ease of use and extension. You will also be able to understand the principles of Puppet's function.

Chapter 4, Modularizing Manifests with Classes and Defined Types, helps you learn the most important structural elements of Puppet manifests. Find out how to use them for best results.

Chapter 5, Extending Your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules, takes you on a tour of downloadable extensions, with a guide to making your own. Extend Puppet to your specific needs.

Chapter 6, Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language, teaches you to interpret and use language features beyond the basics.

Chapter 7, New Features from Puppet 4 helps you learn about the new Type system and data processing features. It also helps you to understand the deprecations and what to change to make use of the new features.

Chapter 8, Separating Data from Code Using Hiera, gives you an introduction to the powerful configuration data storage that comes with Puppet. In this chapter, you will learn to model your infrastructure naturally in a hierarchy.