Pulling Strings with Puppet
Posted by Nishit Shah on February 24th, 2008
Puppet is an open source configuration management tool. It is written in Ruby. Being a System Administrator, one of the aspects of my job is to find out the tedious tasks which are done frequently and automate them. Automation is usually done using BASH, Perl, Python scripts but they have their limitations. Puppet is a very powerful tool and it is capable of automating nearly every aspect of a system administrator’s job, from user management, to software installation, to even configuring server services such as FTP and LDAP. Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy is the first book to introduce the powerful Puppet system administration tool. Thanks to prompt action by the librarian at office, this book was in my hand in no time! Author James Turnbull guides through Puppet’s key features, installation and configuration of the software, creation of automated Puppet tasks, known as recipes, and even creating reporting solutions and ways to extend Puppet as per our requirements. I have just started with this book and am very impressed with the way the author has explained each and everything about puppet’s installation and configuration. Since Puppet is written in Ruby and its recipes have a Ruby like syntax, I am getting my hands dirty a bit on Ruby first. I am not much of a programmer and do hardly any coding. However, I heard a lot about how cool Ruby is during the recent BarCampPune4 and I was able to understand most of the stuff from the session on Ruby by Sidu Ponnappa. Its been just a day since I have started with it and find it interesting already. So, as one thing leads to another, I hope by March end I am well versed with Ruby and and have implemented Puppet to automate a set of servers 
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