This is a basic puppet + nginx as a proxy setup demonstration that allows you to do the following in a local Vagrant environment:
1) Create a puppet managed nginx node that serves a simple web page with an image
2) Create a puppet managed nginx proxy node that proxies all requests to a ‘set’ of backend web server nodes. These nodes may be one or more of the nodes you’ve created in the first step above.
Steps:
Make sure that Vagrant is installed on your local machine. I’m assuming OSX here. Then use the appropriate commands (e.g. vagrant up) to bring up the machines.
For the puppet master, use:
vagrant up ppmaster
This will give you a new Debian Jessie box, and we need to install the puppet server as follows:
apt-get install puppetmaster-passenger
We now need to setup the puppet master’s configuration, and copy our node and module configuration into the right place. The files we need to update are puppet.conf and autosign.conf.
The master automatically looks for it’s manifests like site.pp in the /etc/puppet/manifests directory so we need to copy the site.pp into the directory, as well as the nodes and modules directories.
All of this can be checked out using Github directly onto the puppet master, or you can copy things manually.
Once you’ve got the puppet master running with all the modules in the right place, you can go ahead and create the first web node, web1:
vagrant up web1
This will use the commands in bootstrap.sh to automatically install puppet and add the IP of the puppet master in the /etc/hosts file. If the IP of your puppet master is different for any reason, please update it here.
You can login to the web node using vagrant ssh web1 then use sudo -i to become root and use tail -f /var/log/syslog to check if the puppet runs were successful, or you can run puppet yourself manually using puppet agent -t.
We need to test if the web node is indeed serving up our file properly. You can do this by installing something like links inside the machine locally and checking on localhost, or you can use SSH port forwarding as below:
vagrant ssh web1 -- -L8000:localhost:80
This will forward your local machine’s port 8000 to the guest VM's port 80, allowing you to view the web page in your local browser at http://localhost:8000.
This completes our basic web server setup, now let’s setup the proxy.
Use the following to bring up the proxy server:
vagrant up proxy1
Use the same procedure as described above to check whether the puppet runs have completed successfully, then, use the following command to forward the local port 8080 to the guest VM’s port 80:
vagrant ssh proxy1 -- -L8080:localhost:80
After that’s done, SSH to both the web1 and proxy1 machines, become root and run the following command to monitor the access logs of both machines:
tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log
Now, send a request to your local machine on the port that proxy1 is using - 8080. This should forward the request to the backend web server, and you should see this happening in the access logs, for example:
Proxy server:
root@proxy1# tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log
::1 - - [14/Feb/2017:03:30:55 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 540 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36”
Web Server:
root@web1# tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log
192.168.1.119 - - [14/Feb/2017:03:30:55 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 860 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36”
As you can see, the access logs on the web server have the IP address of the proxy server in them - 192.168.1.119, which is just as it should be.
You can now add even more machines, i.e. web2, web3, etc to the backend. Just define the machines in Vagrant, bring them up and run puppet on them. Then, edit the nginx.conf file on the proxy1 machine (this is in puppet too), to add these new machines and you are all setup with a simple nginx proxy setup.