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I am working on one-click deployment of a system onto Ubuntu machine. Just started using Puppet for this. It appears, in order for me to use external modules, I must pre-install them using something like

puppet module install foo

Questions:

  1. Do I always have to pre-install modules in order for me to use them?
  2. How do I automate Puppet modules installation?

It's a standalone puppet set up (so not a master-slave one). I will have to repeat this many times for different customers. Hence will be nice to have a single button doing all the work for me. In later stage, there is a place for master-slave setup. But it must be independent for each customer though.

oleksii
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3 Answers3

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I'm working in a master less setup.

You should probably look at librarian-puppet You write Puppetfile describe all your modules :

  • local directory,
  • remote git,
  • puppet forge

and librarian-puppet will compute a modules directory for you. 

librarian-puppet install

You can then upload it to the target machine and launch the puppet apply. It works well with vagrant also.

config.vm.provision :puppet, :module_path => "modules"
mestachs
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  • Not exactly what I was looking for, but I found librarian-puppet really useful. It also works on Windows, which is my dev platform. Thumb up for the help. I will mark my own answer as accepted. – oleksii Jan 18 '14 at 10:06
3

Answering my own question.

Do I always have to pre-install modules in order for me to use them?

No, I don't. In a single node set up (masterless) the modules can be put into the --modulepath=/my-module-root path and puppet will pick them up. My problem was that the folder name for the module, did not match the class in the init.pp. For example

| modules
| -- gini_cassandra   ++ HERE ++
| ---- manifests
| ------ init.pp

Inside init.pp I had 

class cassandra ...

Once I renamed gini_cassandra to cassandra things started working.

How do I automate Puppet modules installation?

As I don't need to install the modules in a masterless setup, I don't need to automate it. However, I found librarian-puppet (thanks to this answer) to be really useful. I don't need to version-control external modules. Librarian will pull them for me on both my machine, target machine where I run installation, and on the build machine.

Community
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oleksii
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If you're using a puppet master then you only need to install modules on the master. Client machines will not need them since the master will compile their config for them.

So if there's a module you want to use, a 1 time 'puppet module install foo' on the master is all that's required.

rojs
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  • Make sense. In my set up, however, it's a single puppet node. I have to repeat this many times, for each customer. Is there any way to exclude manual step of `puppet module install foo`? – oleksii Jan 16 '14 at 14:16
  • Create a puppet class that installs them with exec resources? – rojs Jan 18 '14 at 05:37