Rails Puppet Quickstarter

This is a really simple collection of Puppet manifests to set up a single Ubuntu Hardy machine with the necessary dependencies to run Rails.

It uses mod_passenger with apache2 to serve Rails, Postfix for mailing, and collectd for performance monitoring.

It's intended that Puppet is run against these manifests locally, negating the need for a Puppetmaster. That said, the manifests should work in a Puppet/Puppetmaster setup with minimal alteration.

Installing Puppet on machine

$ sudo aptitude install puppet git-core
$ git clone git://github.com/auxesis/rails-puppet-quickstart.git  

Describing your machine

You'll need to know the fqdn of the machine you're managing. The easiest way to get this is by running:

$ facter |grep ^fqdn

(facter collects facts about a system that Puppet can use)

Next you'll need to specify the FQDN of the machine in manifests/nodes/railsnode.pp. Substitute the FQDN into the node section.

You might want to rename the railsnode.pp file to the hostname of the machine, but it's personal preference.

Lastly, Rename the config/nodes/railsnode directory to the FQDN of the machine.

Running Puppet

Because we're not using Puppet in an end-to-end provisioning setup, we have to do a small amount of lifting to get it going:

$ sudo puppet --debug --verbose rails-puppet-quickstart/puppet/manifests/site.pp --tags ruby
$ sudo puppet --debug --verbose rails-puppet-quickstart/puppet/manifests/site.pp

(path to site.pp is relative to your current working directory)

We run with --tags ruby the first time so that /etc/apt/sources.list can be modified, and apt can be updated.

Everything should be hunky-doory after that, so we run without any --tags option.

If you make any changes, just run the second command again:

$ sudo puppet --debug --verbose rails-puppet-quickstart/puppet/manifests/site.pp

TODO

• create class structure for managing multiple apache vhosts
• include example passenger config
• manage /etc/apt/sources.list properly
• include fastcgi + apache + php config

COPYRIGHT + LICENCE

2009, Lindsay Holmwood lindsay@holmwood.id.au

Distributed under the MIT Licence: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php