I’ve dabbled with, attended presentations for, and read about configuration management systems for quite a while. For at least the past year, every time I start up a new project I can’t help but think about all of the benefits that would ensue from wrapping my work in a managed server configuration. I decided recently to bite the bullet and dive into Puppet head.
In getting started, and to keep things simple, I decided to utilize a Vagrant box running 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS (Precise Pangolin). After navigating a couple of small road bumps, things are looking pretty good!
The first bump in the road was getting the following message when trying to run puppet despite setting the hostname from within the VM:
Warning: Could not retrieve fact fqdn
Warning: Host is missing hostname and/or domain: bump
The easy way to solve this one is to simply declare the hostname in the Vagrantfile for the VM as follows:
config.vm.hostname = "bump"
The next little hurdle was learning about modules and using “–modulepath”. In this case I set an include in the nodes.pp file to pull in a simple module and ran the following command to get the message below:
sudo puppet apply ./manifests/site.pp
Error: Could not find class hurdle for bump on node bump
The fix in this case as implied by the lead-in is to pass the path to the ‘modules’ directory in the ‘puppet apply’ command:
sudo puppet apply ./manifests/site.pp --modulepath=/path/to/puppet/modules/
That’s all. Pretty pumped to find new and exciting hurdles with Puppet.