Puppet Cheat-Sheet

Puppet is a declarative configuration management tool: you describe the desired state of a machine in manifests and an agent makes the machine match. Use puppet apply for a single host or testing, and an agent talking to a Puppet server for a fleet.

Documentation: Puppet docs · man puppet-apply Project: Puppet

Verification: options checked against the Puppet 8 man pages (Ubuntu 24.04 package, December 2023 pages). The manifest, EPP template and the apply, resource, facts, config, lookup, parser and epp commands were run in a throwaway container with puppet apply; no Puppet server, agent-to-server run, Hiera hierarchy or Forge module was tested.

Related sheets: Ansible, Ansible-Playbook, Terraform, Salt, Vagrant.

Run Puppet #

--detailed-exitcodes uses 2 for “changes applied”, so a clean second run returning 0 is the idempotence check.

Inspect and Change Resources #

Manifest Basics #

Resources have a type, a title and attributes. ensure, require, notify and subscribe order and trigger them.

class motd_demo (
  String  $message = 'Managed by Puppet',
  Boolean $enable  = true,
) {
  file { '/tmp/motd-demo':
    ensure  => file,
    mode    => '0644',
    content => epp('motd_demo/motd.epp', { 'message' => $message }),
  }

  exec { 'say-hello':
    command     => '/bin/echo changed',
    refreshonly => true,
    subscribe   => File['/tmp/motd-demo'],
  }
}

node default {
  class { 'motd_demo':
    message => "Hello from ${facts['networking']['hostname']}",
  }
}

The EPP template modules/motd_demo/templates/motd.epp:

<%- | String $message | -%>
<%= $message %>

Run it with puppet apply --modulepath modules site.pp. A second run changes nothing and exits 0 with --detailed-exitcodes.

Common resource types:

Modules and Data #

A module is a directory with manifests/, templates/, files/, lib/ and data/; manifests/init.pp defines the class named after the module.

Server and Certificates #

The puppetserver ca commands were not checked against a server here.

Troubleshooting #

See Also #

• Ansible
• Terraform
• Vagrant
• Salt
• Chef