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PyCon 2011 Atlanta

March 9th–17th

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Dependency management with Puppet

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Novice / Talk
March 11th 4:55 p.m. – 5:25 p.m.
Puppet is a configuration management tool that we'll learn to use the easy way. We'll introduce the Puppet language and the concept of resources like packages, files, shell commands, and more. We'll use Puppet to build our dev environment and deploy it to production servers.

Abstract

We've all been there: religiously following the steps in some blog post for the 47th time trying to setup a shiny new server. We thought we'd improved the situation when we copied our Bash history into doit.sh and committed it. Then along came Pip and requirements.txt files.

That's where most of us are today. Pip can only manage Python packages so much of our servers' behavior is left to Lady Luck. Puppet gives us the power to efficiently and confidently specify everything our program needs.

We'll start at square one and the concept of resources, the basic unit of configuration management. We'll learn the Puppet language's resource syntax. We'll talk about obvious resource types like packages and files plus less obvious types like shell commands, users, groups, and daemons. We'll compose resources into larger ones, declare dependencies between resources, and accommodate differences between OS X and Linux.

These Puppet manifests can satisfy our program's dependencies on demand, making them ideal parts of the deploy process. We'll walk through how Puppet is used to build production environments both through tools such as Fabric and Puppet's traditional client-server mode.

Dependency hell doesn't have to be your reality. Consistent, reliable environments can be had with Puppet.