Puppetverse

A Little Puppet Open Source Ecosystem Using Vagrant, Borrowing from binford2k's puppet-in-a-box

Puppetverse provides a small, virtual Puppet lab you can deploy using VirtualBox and Vagrant. After installing VirtualBox and Vagrant, you can clone this repository, cd into its directory, and issue the command vagrant up to set up and provision a working puppet master (master) and two agents (arrakis and caladan).

It's o.k., but it's also just a few hours' work hacking on someone else's thing to suit my Debianesque proclivities.

Setting Up

You need VirtualBox and Vagrant.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is freely available virtualization software that provides the headless VMs Vagrant provisions. You can download it from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. Once you have it installed, you won't need to do anything else with it. Vagrant will handle the rest.

Vagrant

Vagrant is an open source tool that allows you to quickly stand up virtual environments and code that closely match production environments. You can download Vagrant from http://downloads.vagrantup.com and follow the installation instructions on the Vagrant site.

Puppetverse

You can clone this project with the following command:

git clone git://github.com/pdxmph/puppetverse.git

Running

$ cd puppetverse

$ vagrant up

If you'd prefer to bring up a single agent without the others, pass the agent name(s) as arguments to vagrant up, e.g. vagrant up master or vagrant up master arrakis

Using

Getting Around

If you don't customize anything, the following commands will log you in to each of the nodes:

• $ vagrant ssh master
• $ vagrant ssh caladan
• $ vagrant ssh arrakis

Once you're logged in, passwordless sudo is available, e.g.

$ vagrant ssh caladan

$ sudo puppet agent -t

Halting vs. Destroying

• Done with your environment, but want to keep your changes and power down your VMs? $ vagrant halt
• Done with your environment, but want to keep your changes and pause your VMs without having to start them from boot later? $ vagrant suspend
• Done with your environment, and want to destroy your changes and start fresh? $ vagrant destroy

Individual nodes can be halted (shut down), suspended (paused), or destroyed (reset to their initial status before you modified them) by entering their names after the halt, suspend, or destroy arguments:

$ vagrant halt arrakis

$ vagrant destroy arrakis

$ vagrant suspend arrakis

Changes to the Puppet Environment

For now, if you decide to change the site.pp manifest on the master node, you'll need to reprovision master for the puppet master running on it to register the change:

$ vagrant provision master

Customizing

• Adding Hosts: The puppet_agents hash in Vagrantfile is where you can add/change the nodes Vagrant stands up as agents in :hostname => IP_ADDRESS pairs.
• Networking: The master is assigned the IP address 192.168.33.10. If you don't like this, or if it conflicts with your network settings, you'll need to change that in a few places:
  • files/puppet_master.conf
  • Vagrantfile
  • manifests/default.pp
• Host names: By default, you get master, caladan and arrakis. You can change the agent names by editing the puppet_agents array in Vagrantfile.
• Base Box: The base box is an Ubuntu/Precise VM provided by the Vagrant project. You can change the base box by editing the box and box_url variables in Vagrantfile.
• RAM: The master is configured to use 1024MB of RAM, the agents are configured to use 512MB of RAM. Look for mconfig.vm.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 1024] in Vagrantfile to change this.

Peculiarities

A few things you might or might not want to attend to before using:

• puppetverse makes sure it has the Puppet apt repository set up and upon vagrant up it will make sure it has the very newest version of Puppet Open Source (running an apt-get update during the provisioning phase). If you peek into /manifests/master.pp and remove the apt::source and "update" exec, provisioning will speed up a little, but you'll get Puppet 2.7 (if you keep the default box, which is Ubuntu Precise).

TODO

• Make modules dir portable
• Separate the "vagrant provisions" part from the "puppet master stands on its own hind legs" part and put the /etc/puppet tree in a mounted directory so it can be manipulated from outside the VM without having to reprovision.
• Do more with templates so it's easier to fiddle with the network address, host names, etc.
• Make NFS mounts make sense for the bits where all the nodes are spun up and independent of Vagrant's bootstrap/provision sequence.