Puppet: Working with puppetforge

So maybe writing modules isn’t something you want to hassle with. Ok, that’s cool. Puppetlabs has provided a place where you can leach off of others. In this article, I will talk about how to use PuppetForge (forge.puppetlabs.com)

There is a good chance that if you thought of a module to write, someone may have already done it and can save you a LOT of work. Most of the modules will support the big three Linux flavors out there, but not all so your results may vary with each and every module. Puppetlabs is working on improving that, but its something to keep in mind as we go through this article.

You can browse on the web site and see what is there but I’m going to take you straight into getting your hands dirty by not only searching, but installing modules directly into your puppet tree from the command line.

Using the puppet client

Search

Since we’re all new here, let’s do a bit of searching to see what we can install.

This will go out to the forge and list all of the modules matching your search. This can be a bit daunting at times as there are several versions of the same package, but don’t worry, we’ll guide you a bit on your way.

Oh sweet jeebus…we have a few versions of apache. This is the difficult part about working with the forge. Basically, you’d have to go out to each module page and find the one that you think is the best fit for your needs. Or, I use a common rule of thumb, if puppetlabs has a version of it, install their first. If they don’t do everything that you need, then start searching around.

Installing

To install is pretty easy. Just one simple command and it will not only install your module, but also the other modules that it depends upon. Let’s install the PuppetLabs Apache module and you’ll see what I mean.

As you can see, puppetlabs-apache requires puppetlabs-firewall and puppetlabs-stdlib so it went out and grabbed those. If we look in your /etc/puppet/modules directory, we will now see the other modules listed.

Listing

We can also get a listing of the modules installed on our system by simply typing the list command.

As you can see, I have several modules installed on my system, not all of which are from the forge. If its on the forge, there is a semver on the module letting you know the version that you have installed.

Upgrading

Of coarse, upgrading is just as easy as installing. Just swap out install for upgrade and away you go.

Let’s make sure it upgraded shall we

Uninstall

Say you didn’t like the version of puppetlabs-apache that you installed, easy enough to clean it up.

Now one thing to keep in mind. The uninstall will not remove modules that were required on initial install. Probably due to the fact that it doesn’t go through and check all the other modules to make sure that it is not needed elsewhere. Better to leave well enough alone and keep those in the repo. If you want to remove those, you’ll have to do it manually.

Conclusion

While writing modules is fun, using someone else’s module that has already solved the problem saves you time and allows you to automate a lot more of your environment faster. Updating the MOTD, adding users, updating sudo are all examples of problems that have already been solved. Let’s not recreate the wheel, its round enough the way it is.

If you want to see a nice video demo of the forge in action, check out this video from PuppetLabs…

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