Automating With Puppet: Initial setup

As you manage more and more with Puppet, and add more contributors to the Puppet code base, you’ll want to manage scale and complexity for yourself and your team. You can do this by taking advantage of a Puppet control repository.

The control repository holds all the information needed to construct a Puppet environment. We’ve combined all the hard-won best practices for managing Puppet infrastructures into the example control repository below.

The following instructions will show you how to implement these best practices on Day One, so your Puppet Enterprise deployment can scale as rapidly as you need it to.

If you’ve already set up a control repository for your installation, you can safely skip this step.

Deploy Your Code

In order to make changes to your Puppet code you will need need to do the following things:

• Make the changes locally.
• Push those changes to GitHub.
• Pull those changes down to the Puppet master.

Although you can circumvent this by editing code directly on the Puppet master, it's much easier to collaborate if you are using this process.

Once you have made changes to your Puppet code and pushed those changes to GitHub, you should do the following to get it onto the master:

1. Add and commit your changes to Git using git add and git commit .
2. Push those changes to GitHub using git push.
3. Pull the new code down onto the master using puppet code deploy production --wait (on the Puppet master).

If you think this is tedious, then just automate it.

Now you’re ready to start automating with Puppet! Watch this space for the rest of our series to learn about other common processes you can automate with Puppet.

Dylan Ratcliffe is a professional services engineer at Puppet.