MultiInstall

Installs multiple versions of a program or library simultaneously

In multi-user environments you sometimes want to support multiple versions of a software package at the same time, so that for instance you can gradually migrate users between versions. In HPC environments the 'Module' system is commonly used for this.

MultiInstall is a highly configurable Puppet module for installing and configuring multiple versions of a package on a single server.

Using MultiInstall

The multiinstall Puppet type takes a list of tags signifying the package versions to install, as well as the names of three Puppet types. These are the 'installer', the 'configurer' and the 'chooser' types. These in turn install a single tag, configure that tag and provide a mechanism for users to choose which of the tags to run.

There are a set of example types in the manifest directory that show how this works.

• The type multiinstall::install::vcsrepo downloads tags from a version-controlled repository using the puppetlabs-vcsrepo module

• The type multiinstall::configure::template configures a package using a Puppet template file

• The type multiinstall::chooser::wrapper sets up a wrapper which selects the version to run using an environment variable

To expand the options you can pass in your own custom types to multiinstall. For instance you might create an installer that installs different Python library versions using Pip, and a chooser that creates module files for each version. Pull requests are welcomed to add new helper types

Other notes

Each of the helper types can be passed options by using the hashes in the main multiinstall type, eg.

multiinstall {'cylc':
    install_version => 'master',
    install_type    => 'multiinstall::install::vcsrepo',
    install_options => {
        repository  => 'https://github.com/cylc/cylc',
    },
}

Obsolete versions can be purged by setting the purge option to true