Puppet for Developers Training Course

Who should attend

This course is aimed at Software Developers who are looking to use Puppet, Vagrant and Facter to improve their development environment configuration management.

Prerequisites

Delegates should have some experience of using Linux with the Command Line - please let us know if you need help with this as we can organise a short workshop to get you up to speed with the essentials.

Live, instructor-led online and on-site training

This Puppet course is available for private / custom delivery for your team - face-to-face, on-site at your location of choice, or remotely via MS Teams, Zoom or your own platform - get in touch to find out how we can deliver tailored training which focuses on your project requirements and learning goals.

What is Puppet?

Puppet Essentials
What puppet does to systems and when
How to perform a manual run and add varying levels of output

• --noop, --test, --verbose, --debug

Registering nodes

Vagrant

What is Vagrant and why?
Requirements for using vagrant, software and packages
Creating your own Virtual Machine with Vagrant
Getting a basic VM up and running
Checking for existing VMs
Vagrant layout
Commands to control and use your VM

• Exercise: Create a simple vagrant VM of your own with a simple manifest, and check that it worked successfully.

Manifests and modules

What is a manifest
What is a module
Structure and layout
Syntax of a manifest and module
Class definitions
Node definitions
A simple manifest
A simple module

• Exercise:Create a simple module for your vagrant node to execute. Add it to Vagrant structure, but without committing it to Git. Make changes to the module and manifest and check that your changes affected your VM.

Types and Attributes

What are attributes and types
Where to find out more about types and attributes and understand the puppet labs documentation
Work with types, such as

• File
• Package
• Exec
• Service
• Notify
• User

Use multiple arguments for a type

1. Example of creating a recursive directory
2. Add multiple users
3. Start multiple services

• Exercise: Configure and build a service with user requirement, and start the service, or have puppet restart the service if a file has changed. Use exec to action a non-puppet command.

Definitions

What is a definition
Using definitions to create multiple types with varying values

• Exercise: Create multiple users with parameters

Hiera Data Within Puppet

What is hiera?

How does Puppet know to use hiera data?

Structure of hiera data and the different storage types

• Scalar, array and hashes

• Exercise: Changing your manifest to use hiera

Facter

What is Facter
Using facter variables in Puppet
Creating and deploying your own facter variables

Template and Files

How to copy files verbatim to your host
Files with varying values (templates)
Using hiera with your templates

• Exercise: Create a configuration file for your service that requires varying attributes, and a file that should not change values.