Chapter 8. External Tools and the Puppet Ecosystem

	By all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure.
	--Robert Bringhurst, 'The Elements of Typographic Style'

In this chapter we will cover:

• Creating custom facts

• Adding external facts

• Setting facts as environment variables

• Importing configuration data with Hiera

• Storing secret data with hiera-gpg

• Generating manifests with puppet resource

• Generating manifests with other tools

• Testing your Puppet manifests with rspec-puppet

• Using public modules

• Using an external node classifier

• Creating your own resource types

• Creating your own providers

• Creating custom functions