Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide by John Arundel – A quick review

I’ve started to learn about Puppet and I’ve found this book in my Safari Books suscription. It has been published recently by Packt and I’ve read it in just a few hours but I’ll surely reread it to be sure that I’ve understood all the concepts :-D.

The book is clear about it’s target audience… it’s a beginner’s guide! and it has been a valuable resource. If you are looking for a more in-depth analysis for Puppet advanced topics, I guess you should try other books and resources, but I surely try to read the same author’s Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

The author provides many examples for each topic covered and it’s very easy to read.  The examples were written using Ubuntu but I had no problem trying them in my CentOS system. I also liked the thoughts shared by the author about his practical experience with system administration and why Puppet is awesome. It also provides a nice and brief introduction about Git and explains how to use it to distribute the manifests to your machines instead of using the centralized approach with Puppetmaster (this topic is not covered by the book).

Sure, you have plenty of information and tutorials about Puppet… but I’m a beginner and I wanted a single book to start learning…. I really liked it!.

Configuring PuppetLabs repository in CentOS 6

Hi,
these days I’m busy in learning Puppet.

Here’s a tip, Puppet is available in the EPEL repository but if you want to run a newer version in your CentOS 6 system (64 bits) you can download it from the official PuppetLabs repository (there’s a different repository for EL 5). I’ve tested this steps in my CentOS 6.4.

First, create a repo file with this information:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/puppetlabs.repo

// Add the following content and save the file
[puppetlabs]
name=PuppetLabs official yum repository
baseurl=http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/x86_64/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://yum.puppetlabs.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-puppetlabs

Now try to download the puppet package enabling temporarily the puppetlabs repo (using –enablerepo, this repository is disabled with enabled=0). You’ll have to accept PuppetLabs gpg key to download the file.

yum --enablerepo=puppetlabs install puppet

And that’s it, you have puppet 3.1 in your CentOS system.

# puppet --version
3.1.1

 Enjoy!