Provisioning Systems with XL Deploy and Puppet

Recently I was with a customer who had done a lot of work with Puppet to provision their servers and they were interested in leveraging that Puppet work when they migrated to XL Deploy and XL Release.  They had discovered that Puppet did a great job provisioning their servers, but was not so good at releasing their code.  I was quickly able to show them how to integrate Puppet with XL Deploy.

XL Deploy has a plugin for puppet so we can use that to implement our puppet manifests.  You also need to have puppet installed on your target server.  Once you have done that you can create XL Deploy packages that include puppet manifests.  XL Deploy will copy the puppet manifest files over your server and run puppet to do your installs.
Lets look at how this is done.  first create a simple puppet manifest based on one from the puppet site.

      file {'testfile':
      path    => '/tmp/testfile',
      ensure  => present,
      mode    => 0640,
      content => "hello, {{petName}}, How are you?" }

I have done a couple of interesting things here.  First we made a manifest file that will create a file on our remote system.  We could use any puppet manifest commands in this file.  The second thing is that I have included some special characters.  We have an embedded tag {{petName}} that will be replaced before the puppet command is run.  XL Deploy has dictionaries that are a set of key / value pairs.  In out example manifest file the {{petName}} tag will be replaced with what ever is in the dictionary for this environment by XL Deploy during the deployment.
Now lets create a puppet application in XL Deploy with our new puppet manifest.  In XL Deploy we will create an application named MyPuppet and create a version 1.0 of the application.  Then we will add our manifest file.  Puppet manifest files are of type puppet.Manifest.  So we will end up with something like the following:Once we have our application added in our repository we can install it like any other application in XL Deploy.  If we wanted to, we could add other XL Deploy types to our application.  XL Deploy’s model based approach to defining packages will allow XL Deploy to determine the right place to deploy this package in each environment and at what point during the installation process the package should be installed.
Now that we have an application based on our puppet manifest lets install it.  Our puppet manifest file needs to be installed directly on an overthere host.  I have one of those in my XL Deploy server and the deployment looks like the following:We can see from the deployment plan that XL Deploy only has the one steps to copy the manifest over to the host and install it.  In XL Deploy we can look at what it is actually going to do to install this file.  By double clicking on the eyeball above we can see the script that will be executed to run puppet on the host as follows:That’s all there is to running puppet manifests from XL Deploy.  your application packages can include puppet manifests as well as other XL Deploy types.  This gives you a lot of flexibility in managing your applications and the environments they run in.
Source files can be found on GitHub