What's the simplest way of installing Tomcat7 via Puppet with dependencies?

Question

I'm trying to build the simple Puppet recipe as below:

package { 'openjdk-7-jre-headless' :  ensure => installed, }
package { 'tomcat7-common' :          ensure => installed, }
package { 'tomcat7' :                 ensure => installed, require  => Package['tomcat7-common'],}
package { 'tomcat7-admin' :           ensure => installed, require  => Package['tomcat7-common'], }

However when run sudo puppet apply -v tomcat7.pp, I've still these errors:

err: /Stage[main]//Package[tomcat7-common]/ensure: change from purged to present failed: Execution of '/usr/bin/apt-get -q -y -o DPkg::Options::=--force-confold install tomcat7-common' returned 100: Reading package lists...

The following packages have unmet dependencies: tomcat7-common :

Depends: libtomcat7-java (>= 7.0.28-4+deb7u1) but it is not going to be installed

E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

And each time I'm adding new packages, my file is growing making it difficult to read. Do I really need to specify all Tomcat dependencies manually? Or is there any simpler way of doing it?

Why not use the `puppetlabs/tomcat` and `puppetlabs/java` modules? — jordanm, Mar 29 '15 at 15:05
Thanks. But it'll be another dependency (I've already puppetlabs-apache, puppetlabs-mysql, etc.). Do you think it'll be the easiest way? Does it mean that for each package to be installed, it's better to install module, instead of trying to write recipe with dependencies manually? — kenorb, Mar 29 '15 at 15:08
You shouldn't have to write the apt dependencies manually anyways. Something in your `apt` is probably broken (or you need an `apt-get upgrade`). The number of external puppet dependencies really shouldn't matter. You should use something like `r10k` or `puppet-librarian`. — jordanm, Mar 29 '15 at 15:11
Did `apt-get upgrade` and `apt-get update`, it's still the same. — kenorb, Mar 29 '15 at 15:14
You will have to work it out manually. Something in the install chain in likely broken. Unfortunately, `apt` doesn't do a good job of reporting where the actual problem is. — jordanm, Mar 29 '15 at 15:15
I think the problem was that I had: `libtomcat6-java solr-tomcat tomcat6 tomcat6-common` still installed (despite I was removing them before, but too many different packages it had). I did `sudo apt-get install libtomcat7-java` manually so these were removed by `apt-get` (The following packages will be REMOVED), then removed `sudo apt-get remove libtomcat7-java`, and then the puppet worked. Is there any similar trick of doing this from Puppet? — kenorb, Mar 29 '15 at 15:17

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 30 '15 at 12:24

Puppet should deal with dependencies automatically, so the simple manifest which should work is:

package { [ 'tomcat7', 'tomcat7-admin' ]: ensure => installed, }

However depending on the problems (like having old Tomcat installed or broken dependencies), these problems should be resolved manually. For example by manually running apt-get tomcat7 and checking what's blocking it (e.g. 'The following packages will be REMOVED' section).

Using Puppet, there is the following workaround:

package { "tomcat7":
  ensure  => latest,
  require  => Exec['apt-get update'],
}

Or by defining absent (or purged), such as:

package { [ 'tomcat6', 'tomcat6-common', 'libtomcat6-java','solr-tomcat' ]:
  ensure => absent
}

to ensure that conflicting packages are not installed on the machine.

What's the simplest way of installing Tomcat7 via Puppet with dependencies?

1 Answers1