And hello, and a big warm welcome to this Pluralsight presentation where we take
a look at implementing Puppet for configuration management.
My name is Andrew Mallet, and I'm going to be your
instructor. Now as we've already seen, there are different tools that we can use.
We'll be taking a look at Puppet in this module.
And just in the same way that CompTIA are agnostics about
their Linux distributions, they're agnostic about the
configuration management tools as well.
Puppet is from Puppet Labs.
They have a Puppet Enterprise version, which is a subscription‑based
version, or we could use the community edition, which is free to
use, and that's what we're looking at.
It's a server/client module.
So if we were running the Puppet server, we'd need to make sure
that inbound traffic on TCP port 8140 was enabled. By default, the
client is going to check into the server to check for any
configuration needs every 20 minutes.
But for local use, we have got the ability to just use
the puppet command and puppet apply.
Puppet apply doesn't then need a server to connect to. Puppet
itself is Ruby based, and we have manifest files.
These manifest files, again, are Ruby based, and they use a .pp extension.
Now when we look at our Puppet repositories,
there are many repositories available.
If we're working with Red Hat,
they don't ship within their standard repositories, but we can add
in the EPEL repository, or we could go through and use the Puppet
Labs repositories. On Ubuntu, the version that ships with a
standard repository is version 5.
Now we can go through and install this.
It's agent, it doesn't have the server, but it will do for us for our
demonstration. Installing it is very, very simple.
We can go through and update our package cache. Now if we just do a
search for puppet, we're going to get a lot coming back. But we could
look for lines beginning with puppet,
but even better, we can say lines beginning with puppet and ending in puppet, so
we're just looking for the puppet package and nothing else.
So it's always good to remember that we can use regular expressions
in many utilities. We can go ahead and install Puppet, and once it's
installed, of course, we can check its version, but we can also gain
help by using puppet help, and it will show me the available
subcommands to Puppet.
Now, like always, the very,
very best way of learning is for you to have these systems set up.
Ideally, we only need the Ubuntu machine running.
I'm going to have all three of my machines running because we
later on are going to do some simple ping tests to make sure
that we were able to add host records.
But reality says we only need the Ubuntu system set up and
running. But let's go through and find a command line and take a look at these labs