Pulling Strings With Puppet - James Turnbull [10]
Caution -► Remember that packages available for platforms may not always be up to date! You should confirm the exact version number of any package you install to ensure it is sufficiently up to date.
There are also packages available for other platforms that are not delivered with the platform itself. You can find packages for SuSE at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/system:/management/. There are two packages, puppet for the client and puppet-server for the server.
Packages for OS X are available from Reductive Labs at http://reductivelabs.com/downloads/packages/OSX/. These packages contain both Puppet and Facter. As I mentioned earlier, the package appears stable but has not been extensively tested.
Reductive also runs an RPM repository that has RPMs, Source RPMs, and specification files that you can use to install on any RPM-based platforms, for example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Mandriva. You can find the repository at https://reductivelabs.com/downloads/rpm/. The Puppet client is installed with an RPM called puppet and the server with an RPM called puppet-server.
An employee of Red Hat, David Lutterkort, also maintains a yum repository that has RPMs available for Fedora Core 5, 6, and 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5. The yum repository is at http://people.redhat.com/dlutter/yum/.
There are Puppet packages for Solaris available from http: //reductivelabs. com/downloads/packages/SunOS/ or from the Blastwave project at http://www.blastwave.org/packages/puppet. There are packages available for both x86 and sparc systems.
Lastly, though not supported, there is some documentation about installing Puppet on AIX athttps://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetAlX.
Caution -* Always remember that third-party repositories should be used at your own risk.
Installing Puppet from a Ruby Gem
You can also install Puppet from a Ruby Gem. RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby, much like the Perl CPAN repository. Before you can use it, you may need to install it. You can check whether you have it installed by the presence of the gem binary.
RubyGems is available as a package with many platforms' package management systems; you can see a full list of these platforms in Table 2-5.
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If there is not a RubyGems package for your platform, you can also download a source package and compile it yourself. You can find the RubyGems source package by clicking the downloads link at http://rubygems.org/.
Download the latest version of RubyGems and unpack it.
We use the ruby binary to run the setup. rb script to install RubyGems like so:
This will install the gem binary, which we can check is functioning like so:
Once you have installed RubyGems, you can use the gem binary to install Gems such as Puppet. The Puppet Gem is located on the Reductive Labs site, and you can install it like so:
Note • When installing Puppet from a Gem, the Facter Gem will also be installed as a dependency.
At the end of the installation process, both the Puppet server and client will be installed.
Note - You can also install the very latest cutting-edge Puppet from its Subversion source repository using the instructions you can find at http://www.reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetSource.
Getting Started with Puppet
Now that we've installed Puppet, let's get the Puppet master daemon up and running and add our first node. One of the strengths of the Puppet infrastructure is that most of the functionality will run with default configuration, without any changes required on your behalf. The only two things we need to get Puppet running are a user and group to run it and a very basic configuration to apply to our first node. In this section, we will create