This document contains notes from a presentation on getting started with Puppet. It discusses several key resources for learning Puppet including documentation, style guides, roles and profiles, Hiera, tooling like Git and Vagrant, and community resources like mailing lists and meetups. The presentation focuses on selecting the most important learning blocks and sequencing them effectively to progress from basic to expert Puppet skills.

1. rake puppetexpert:create
Nathan Valentine
Professional Services Engineer - Puppet Labs
nathan@puppetlabs.com
@nrvale0

2. Why am I here?

3. Managing Windows with Puppet?

4. Spooky action at a distance with
MCollective!

5. Awesome sauce with Puppet + Docker?

6. Argh! Let me go to my corner and play
with my toys!

7. Let's play a game...

8. Easy
"What is Puppet?" with basic examples
clever things others have done with Puppet
How to DevOps-ify your organization with Puppet as a core tool

9. More Difficult
Beyond the basics, how do I become a Puppet expert?
Tons of resources! What's the progression?

10. Meta-learning

11. Meta-learning
Deconstruction: "...minimum learnable units, the LEGO blocks..."
Selection: "Which 20% of the blocks?"
Sequencing: "In what order?"
** shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia and T4HC

12. Selection and Sequencing are important!

13. Let's focus on
Review of available resources
Selection & Sequencing

14. BTW, this presentation linked from Twitter later today:
@nrvale0

15. Getting Started

16. The Usual Suspects
puppet-users mailing list:
http://goo.gl/dgvApa
"Whoa, Nelly! That's a lot of email!"
#puppet on irc.freenode.net

17. Puppet Labs Learning Management System
http://puppetlabs.com/learn

18. Puppet Enterprise Learning VM
http://info.puppetlabs.com/download-learning-puppet-VM.html

19. Puppet Enterprise Training
http://puppetlabs.com/services/training

20. Pro Puppet, Second Edition
http://goo.gl/SEjW6N

21. http://ask.puppetlabs.com

22. http://puppetlabs.com/blog

23. Twitter: @PuppetLabs

24. Oh, also...real people in The Real World!
PuppetConf 2014 in San Francisco, CA!
PuppetCamps ( You must have figured this one out on your own. ;) )
Meetups

25. Puppet DSL Style

26. Validate Your Code
$ ( cd mymodule && puppet parser validate `find ./ -name '*.pp'` )
very basic sanity check ( brackets, commas, etc)
doesn't check for valid attributes for the type

27. Style Guide Check
$ sudo gem install puppet-lint && puppet-lint --with-filename ./mymodule
http://puppet-lint.com
very basic sanity check ( brackets, commas, quotes, etc )
doesn't check for valid attributes for the type

28. Puppet Style ProTip
Implement logic which rejects submission of Puppet code code to your central
git/SVN/etc repositories unless the code passes both 'puppet parser' and puppetlint runs.

29. Online Puppet Lint
puppet-lint As A Service?
http://www.puppetlinter.com
And did you know it has a GitHub Post-Receive Hook?
http://www.puppetlinter.com/github

30. Roles and Profiles
higher and higher levels of abstraction for Puppet code
first publicly proposed by Craig Dunn in:
http://www.craigdunn.org/2012/05/239/
now taught as part of Puppet Labs training
roles composed of profiles
profiles composed of component modules (puppetlabs/apache)
Let's see some code...

31. Hiera
source Puppet top-scopes and class parameters from multiple backends
YAML backend is most popular. Also JSON.
other backends allow non-coders to fiddle with data fed to pre-written
modules
CouchDB, MySQL, LDAP, etc - lots of Hiera backends in the community

32. Tooling (and retooling)

33. Git
For better or worse (Hg lovers), Git dominates in the Puppet community.
GitHub : enough said
BitBucket : http://bitbucket.org
free private repos
'The Git Book' : http://git-scm.com/book
'Learn Git Branching' : http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/

34. New title: "First, learn Vagrant."

35. http://vagrantup.com

36. Vagrant
Disposable repeatable VMs with:
VirtualBox
VMWare
LXC
Docker
etc

37. Let's see some Vagrant magic!

38. Google these when you get home!
librarian-puppet (cool) : https://github.com/rodjek/librarian-puppet
r10k (way cool) : https://github.com/adrienthebo/r10k

39. Google these too!
vagrant-pe_build : https://github.com/adrienthebo/vagrant-pe_build
vagrant-oscar : https://github.com/adrienthebo/oscar

40. Thanks for listening! Feed back to
nathan@puppetlabs.com