Comments on: Minimalistic Practical Introduction to Puppet (Not Only) For Vagrant Users

By: Jakub Holý

Jakub Holý — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 07:42:44 +0000

Hi Justin, thank you for the positive feedback I;m not using Vagrant with master-slave so there won;t be an article about that. However the learning VM might well help with that. Good luck with Vagrant and Puppet.

By: Jakub Holý

Jakub Holý — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 07:40:43 +0000

@Stas” As Justin wrote. Particularly for JDK, we are installink open jdk to our Ubuntu servers, it;s in the repositories (you can also add 3rd-party repositories as we do e.g. for MongoDB and install from them). For some packages we manually install the .deb package the offer, e.g. hadoop (using exec to execute wget and package with the dpkg provider).

By: Justin Forder

Justin Forder — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 04:12:40 +0000

Thanks, Jakub – I had the same difficulty when I started learning Vagrant and Puppet last year. It’s time I had another go, and learned a bit more. I need to take my first steps with a master/agent setup – maybe a good subject for a follow-up article. Thanks for the pointer to the Learning Puppet VM (and the associated tutorial) – I shall use that for my next steps.

@Stas – Puppet’s package operations give an abstraction over the OS/distro-specific package management. For the problem you are referring to, you would need to take your own private copy of the JDK and use that to install. For example, if you accept the license agreement, download the binary installer and execute it (which may involve a bit of further interaction regarding registration), you end up with a JDK directory like jdk1.6.0_32. If you zip that up and put it on your own server, it should then be easy to write a Puppet script to download and install it (putting it in the right place and adding environment variable settings). A more polished approach would be to make your own package containing the JDK – then you could use Puppet’s package type to install it, specifying the source. (And that’s another thing I need to learn to do myself – I’ll see if I can use the OpenJDK packages as a model.)

By: Stas

Stas — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:17:09 +0000

Thanks for reply. I am not talking about jdk for puppet, but I mean if I want to ensure jdk installation with puppet (like you do with vim in your example).

Problem is with jdk is that it can’t be distributed via repositories, only downloaded from Oracle website directly (with accepting license on downloading). So it needs to be some how attached to puppet manifest when executing it.

Also, what bothers me are interactive installations of some software. I am not proficient in *nix, but sometimes I came across with installation of packages which require some interaction with user when installing. Have you ever tried install it with puppet?

By: Jakub Holý

Jakub Holý — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 16:11:00 +0000

Hi Stas,
if there is no [up to date] puppet package then install it manually as described on their page. I’m not sure why you’d need jdk for Puppet but again, I’d try to google it out / install whatever Oracle provides. Good luck!

By: Stas

Stas — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 15:09:05 +0000

Hi!

Do you know where puppet try to get packages? From os native repo (yum, apt, etc.)? what if there are no needed packages, say java (jdk)?