sysadmin ,

Puppet Faces: defaults and ‘puppet node clean’

Puppet Faces are an extendable API for tricking out your Puppet instances. (“Faces” is just short for “Interfaces”.) Just a couple days ago I wrote about my survey of puppet + ec2 provisioning tools.

The problem I’m trying to solve, which I don’t feel like I’ve solved well, is how to give a type to a new system at bootstrap time, without using DNS. The type variable maps to a node manifest group, and determines the personality of a host – is it a database, webserver or development instance?

What I’d like to do is pass a type to puppet at install time and have the puppetmaster and the agent remember that mapping between host and type.

I did it with a really simple Facter plugin, install scripts named by type (passed in to puppet node install), and a file created by the install script in /etc/puppet.

Then, I wanted to be able to see which hosts were configured with which install type. Facter was aware of the type, so this seemed like it should be pretty easy…

I wrote a quick and dirty Face that pulls information out of $varlib/nodes/*.yaml on the puppet master. I imagine there are better ways to do this, but in the absence of documentation or someone to tell me not to do this, I forged ahead!

There were two things that I spent quite a bit of time chewing on before figuring it out:

  1. If you want to make an :action in your Face the default, you just add default in the body of your :action block. I had to dig through a few cloudpack files before I found it!
  2. If you are creating and terminating hosts frequently, you may end up with a bunch of certs and other annoying metadata laying around. To clean it up, the Puppet Node Face has a command you can run:

    # puppet node clean [hostname]

    You’ll probably need to be the user that’s running puppet for this to work — it affects things that the puppetmaster owns in $varlib.

    If you’re doing this with code, it’s:

    Puppet::Face[:node, :current].clean('hostname')

I put a little patch into a recent version of cloudprovisioner that invokes clean during a terminate. It’s quick and dirty, and only for AWS.

The resources I’ve found useful are:

And to a lesser extent, these blog posts were helpful for filling in a few gaps: