The Foreman

The Foreman is definitively the biggest open source software product related to Puppet and not directly developed by Puppet Labs.

The project was started by Ohad Levy, who now works at Red Hat and leads its development, supported by a great team of internal employees and community members.

The Foreman can work as a Puppet ENC and reporting tool; it presents an alternative to the Inventory System, and most of all, it can manage the whole lifecycle of the system, from provisioning to configuration and decommissioning.

Some of its features have been quite ahead of their times. For example, the foreman() function made possible for a long time what is done now with the puppetdbquery module.

It allows direct query of all the data gathered by The Foreman: facts, nodes classification, and Puppet-run reports.

Let's look at this example that assigns to the $web_servers variable the list of hosts that belong to the web hostgroup, which have reported successfully in the last hour:

$web_servers...