Puppet Pal!

The puppet-pal is a lightweight replacement for librarian-puppet. For our use cases here at turbosquid, it performs far faster than librarian puppet, and is less buggy. Most of our puppet modules come from a single repository at github, or from a private repo, with the occassional module coming from puppet forge.

Because puppet-pal only pulls down a given repo once in a session, it is very fast for this use case. It also does not attempt to resolve dependencies, so it does not depend on the puppet gem (or even puppet) being present on the host, unless you are pulling something from puppet forge, in which case you will need puppet installed (although not in gem form, unless you choose to do so).

There is no lockfile, since we don't worry about dependencies

Installation

gem install puppet_pal

Usage

In the directory that contains your Puppetfile, simply run puppet-pal. puppet-pal will install the requested modules into the modules/ directory. Puppet Pal understands a subset of the Puppetfile commands understood by librarian-puppet:

mod

The mod command installs a module. The single required parameter 'name' indentifies the module to be installed. If no other options are specified, then the module is pulled from puppetforge (via a puppet module install call).

Otherwise, you may pass the :git option to specify a git repo, as well as a :path and/or :branch option to specify a particular path within that repo.

forge

For backward compatibility -- does nothing

Example Puppetfile

forge "http://forge.puppetlabs.com"

mod 'puppetlabs/stdlib'

puppet_common_git = "[email protected]:myrepo/puppet-common.git"

mod 'base_packages',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/base_packages"
mod 'solr',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/solr",
  :branch => "develop"
mod 'mysql',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/mysql"
mod 'digglr',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/digglr"
mod 'rvm',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/rvm"
mod 'deployment_utils',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/deployment_utils"
mod 'python_web',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/python_web"
mod 'apache',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/apache"
mod 'collectd',
  :git => puppet_common_git,
  :path=> "modules/collectd"

Additional command line options

  • --puppet_file -f Specify a puppetfile path other than the default