Reusable Puppet config for Vagrant

This provides a very simple example that shows how you can reuse Puppet configuration between Vagrant and your non-Vagrant systems, including data lookup via Hiera.

Tested with Puppet 3.0.2.

Vagrant

The Vagrant-specific configuration is captured in the Vagrantfile. The resulting Puppet invocation is

cd /tmp/vagrant-puppet/manifests \
&& FACTER_is_vagrant='true' puppet apply \
    --hiera_config hiera.yaml \
    --modulepath '/tmp/vagrant-puppet/modules-0' \
    /tmp/vagrant-puppet/manifests/default.pp

When provisioned (via vagrant up or vagrant provision) you will see the following on the console:

Notice: role::ui configured for vagrant; hostname: 192.168.42.42

Other environments

A sample puppet_apply.sh script is included in the puppet directory. All that is required is to clone this repository (or otherwise make the files available on the target system).

Tweaks

is_vagrant fact

This could be replaced with the direct definition of a data_center fact.

Vagrant shell provisioner

Vagrant takes care of providing mounts for the manifests and modules, so the configuration would only get shuffled around a bit, but it's possible to directly invoke puppet_apply.sh from Vagrant.

hieradata path messiness

There's no way to provide variables to Hiera for path expansion other than via Puppet itself. It's a bit chicken-and-eggy. The provided hiera.yaml uses a relative path to the hieradata directory that is compatible with the Vagrant invocation of Puppet, and the example puppet_apply.sh similarly takes care of the path munging, but it doesn't feel all that clean to me.

References

• Puppet
• Vagrant
• Puppet "pure fact-driven" nodeless configuration
• Jordan Sissel's nodeless and masterless puppet examples