Defining nodes and node grouping

In order to push a manifest, its classes, and assets to systems, they need to be known by Puppet Master. Grouping is practical if you want to push a manifest to a number of hosts without having to modify each configuration node.

How to do it…

In contrast to what the title wants you to believe, you cannot create a group and add nodes. However, you can group nodes and make them behave in a similar way to groups.

Nodes and node groups are defined in /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp or a file at /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp.

Create the configuration node

Create a /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp/rhel7-client.pp file with the following contents:

node 'rhel7-client.critter.be' {
}

Create a node group

Create a /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp/rhel7-clientgroup.pp file with the following contents:

node 'rhel7-client00.critter.be', 'rhel7-client01.critter.be', 'rhel7-client02.critter.be' {
}

There's more…

If you have a strict naming convention, you can use regular expressions to define...