Puppet client management module for Puppet

This module helps installing and configuring a Puppet client. It offers the following features so far:

• configure a specific Puppet server
• Puppet can be configured to run as daemon, manually or from a cronjob
• The cronjob defaults to being run every 30 minutes at a time derived from the client FQDN. Setting splay to spread the load is supported for cron mode
• can configure the Puppetlabs upstream repository

The module is a bit Debian-specific at the moment, patches for other distributions are welcome.

Installation

The modules can be installed via puppet module tool (require version 2.7.14+):

puppet module install bschmidt/puppetclient

Usage

The following class parameters are supported and can either be set from the manifest or from Hiera.

• server: Hostname of the Puppet server, sets server in the [agent] section if defined
• startmode: Sets the startmode of the Puppet client. Can be one of
  • undef (not set): distribution defaults are used
  • 'daemon': /etc/default/puppet/START is set to yes using Augeas, service is enabled and started
  • 'cron': /etc/default/puppet/START is set to no, a cronjob is installed at '/etc/cron.d/puppetclient' to run Puppet at specified minutes on the clock. See $cronminutes
  • 'manual': /etc/default/puppet/START is set to no, no cronjob is installed. Puppet has to be run manually or from another Supervisor
• cronminutes: An array of minutes on the clock where the Puppet client will be run. Only used when startmode == cron. Defaults to a random 30 minute interval based on the client FQDN
• splay: if defined and $startmode == 'cron', wait a random interval of up to $splay seconds for each run. Used to spread the load. It installs a bashscript in /usr/local/bin/waitrandom to do this.
• upstreamrepository: If set to 'true', configure APT to use the Puppetlabs APT Repository. Should work on all Debian-based distributions, but has only been tested on Debian and Ubuntu so far. Success stories regarding other Debian-based distributions are welcome.
  • ATTENTION Although this is supposed to be a boolean variable, you need to set it to 'true' string for the moment due to Puppet Bug #17474. This will be changed once a fixed Puppet release is available

Example:

class {'puppetclient':
    $server      => 'puppet.domain.com',
    $startmode   => 'cron',
    $cronminutes => [ '5','25','45' ],
    $splay       => '300'
}

This sets the server to 'puppet.domain.com' and configures Puppet to be run from cron every 20 minutes. To ease the load on the server each individual run will be delayed up to 300 seconds (five minutes).

The same can be archieved by setting the following variables in Hiera:

 puppetclient::server :      'puppet.domain.com'
 puppetclient::startmode :   'cron'
 puppetclient::cronminutes : [ '5','25','45' ]
 puppetclient::splay :       300

If you want to set $upstreamrepository, you currently need to use 'true' (the string), not true (Boolean value)

puppetclient::config

You can also set and overwrite arbitrary files in the generated puppet.conf from Hiera, and possibly from plain Puppet manifests, too. You need to create a nested hash and pass it to 'puppetclient::config', where the outer key is the section and the inner key is the variable to be set. Due to limitations of stdlib only the

• main
• master
• agent

sections are currently supported, new sections are quite easy to add (look into manifests/config.pp).

It is recommended to set those values from Hiera, i.e.

puppetclient::config::data :
    master :
        reportfrom : 'some.mail@domain.com'

Another interesting parameter is puppetclient::config::configfile, which sets the filename of the puppet.conf generated from the puppetclient class and the data in Hiera. This can for example easily be used to create a puppet.conf.d directory where you can drop-in other config file parts like this:

Hiera:

puppetclient::config::configfile : '/etc/puppet/puppet.conf.d/10-puppetclient.conf'

Manifest:

file {
  "/etc/puppet/puppet.conf.d/":
    owner => root,
    group => root,
    mode => 0550,
    ensure => directory,
    notify => Exec["compile puppet.conf"];
}

class { 'puppetclient': }

File[hiera('puppetclient::config::configfile', '/etc/puppet/puppet.conf')] ~> Exec['compile puppet.conf']

# Compile /etc/puppet/puppet.conf from individual files in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf.d
exec { "compile puppet.conf":
  path => "/usr/bin:/bin",
  command => "cat /etc/puppet/puppet.conf.d/??-*.conf > /etc/puppet/puppet.conf",
  refreshonly => true;
}

Author

Bernhard Schmidt berni@birkenwald.de

Licence

Apache License, Version 2.0

Support

Please log tickets and issues at the project homepage

2015-01-01 Bernhard Schmidt - 0.2.0

• use deep_merge() from puppetlabs-stdlib 4.2.0
• drop templatedir, manifest and modulepath from default configuration according to https://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/environments_classic.html#config-file-environments-are-deprecated

2014-01-20 Bernhard Schmidt - 0.1.4

• puppetclient is now compatible with parser=future

2013-06-15 Bernhard Schmidt - 0.1.3

• Add Ubuntu support (handle it like Debian) Thanks to Elias Probst for the patch

2013-05-25 Bernhard Schmidt - 0.1.2

• Fixes for Puppet 3.2
  • Also add dependencies section of the Puppetlabs APT repository
  • cron: add --no-daemonize option and redirect to /dev/null, workaround for https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/20900
  • Fix depreciation warning in puppet.conf.erb

2013-04-12 Bernhard Schmidt - 0.1.1

• Add changelog
• Order sections and keys in generated configfile to get a predictable output
• Do not stop Service['puppet'] with startmode 'cron' or 'manual', it often also kills the manually started instance like a self-destruct. This might leave a daemon process running when initially switching to another start mode, but this is definitely the lesser evil right now.
• New parameter puppetclient::config::configfile to set filename of the generated config file, add example to README.md