What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting started with Puppet, introduces Puppet and gets you up and running with the Vagrant virtual machine that accompanies this book.

Chapter 2, Creating your first manifests, shows you how Puppet works, and how to write code to manage packages, files, and services.

Chapter 3, Managing your Puppet code with Git, introduces the Git version control tool, shows you how to create a repository to store your code, and how to distribute it to your Puppet-managed nodes.

Chapter 4, Understanding Puppet resources, goes into more detail about the package, file, and service resources, as well as introducing resources to manage users, SSH keys, scheduled jobs, and commands.

Chapter 5, Variables, expressions, and facts, introduces Puppet's variables, data types, expressions, and conditional statements, shows you how to get data about the node using Facter, and how to create your own custom facts.

Chapter 6, Managing data with Hiera, explains Puppet's key-value database and how to use it to store and retrieve data, including secrets, and how to create Puppet resources from Hiera data.

Chapter 7, Mastering modules, teaches you how to install ready-to-use modules from the Puppet Forge using the r10k tool, introduces you to four key modules including the standard library, and shows you how to build your own modules.

Chapter 8, Classes, roles, and profiles, introduces you to classes and defined resource types, and shows you the best way to organize your Puppet code using roles and profiles.

Chapter 9, Managing files with templates, shows you how to build complex configuration files with dynamic data using Puppet's EPP template mechanism.

Chapter 10, Controlling containers, introduces Puppet's powerful new support for Docker containers, and shows you how to download, build, and run containers using Puppet resources.

Chapter 11, Orchestrating cloud resources, explains how you can use Puppet to provision cloud servers on Amazon AWS, and introduces a fully-automated cloud infrastructure based on Hiera data.

Chapter 12, Putting it all together, takes you through a complete example Puppet infrastructure that you can download and modify for your own projects, using ideas from all the previous chapters.