Deployment of Puppet code is, most of the times, a matter of updating modules, manifests, and Hiera data on relevant directories of the Puppet Master.
We deal with two different kinds of code which involve different management patterns:
- Our modules, manifests, and data
- The public modules we are using
We can manage them in the following ways:
- Using Git—eventually using Git submodules for each Puppet module
- Using the
puppetmodule, for the public modules published on the Forge - Using tools such as
librarian-puppetandr10k - Using other tools or custom procedures we might write specifically for our needs
Librarian-puppet (http://librarian-puppet.com) has been developed to manage the installation of a set of modules from the Puppet Forge or any Git repository. It is based on Puppetfile where the modules and the versions to be installed are defined:
forge "http://forge.puppetlabs.com" # Install a module from the Forge mod 'puppetlabs/concat' # Install a specific version of a module from the Forge mod 'puppetlabs/stdlib', '2.5.1' # Install a module from a Git repository mod 'mysql', :git => 'git://github.com/example42/puppet-mysql.git', # Install a specific tag of a module from a Git repository mod 'mysql', :git => 'git://github.com/example42/puppet-mysql.git', :ref => 'v2.0.2' # Install a module from a Git repository at a defined branch mod 'mysql', :git => 'git://github.com/example42/puppet-mysql.git', :ref => 'origin/develop'
In our modulepath, we can install all the modules referenced in the local Puppetfile using:
librarian-puppet install
r10k has been written by Adrien Thebo, who works in Puppet Labs, to manage deployment of Puppet code from Git repositories or the Forge. It fully supports librarian-puppet's format for the Puppetfile but is an alternative tool that empowers a workflow based on Puppet's dynamic environments.
It can be installed as gem:
gem install r10k
In its configuration file, /etc/r10k.yaml, we define one or more source Git repositories to deploy in the defined basedir:
:cachedir: '/var/cache/r10k'
:sources:
:site:
remote: 'https://github.com/example/puppet-site'
basedir: '/etc/puppetlabs/code/environments'The interesting thing is that for each branch of our Git source, we find a separated directory inside the defined basedir, which can be dynamically mapped to Puppet environments.
To run a deploy from the repository where we have a Puppetfile we can run:
r10k deploy environments -p
This creates a directory for each branch of our repository under /etc/puppet/environments, and inside these directories, we find all the modules defined in the Puppetfile under the modules/ directory.