Work on 2014-06-18

Tags: puppet

Building a system at work to create disposable machines for developer and QA use that will match production. The process looks like this:

• Query Foreman for Puppet classes used by a hostgroup
• Create a Puppetfile with some knowledge about where we keep modules and the names that Foreman provides
• Run r10k to sync the modules

I did a bunch of work to extract some metadata from the Modulefiles, but that was completely unnecessary and thus stupid. Never hurts to take a step back and draw a process before jumping down a rabbit hole.

I have enough information that I could skip creating the Puppetfile all together and just clone the repo myself, but I think I like the idea of using r10k to install modules from the Puppetfile for two reasons:

1. It ensures that stale modules are purged gracefully. (I would have just scorched the Earth and deleted the entire modules directory)
2. It produces an artifact that can be used by other standard tools if necessary.