My first post on Masterless Puppet walked us through setting up puppet in a masterless setup, but we didn’t actually use it to install any software package or files to configure our server, which is the whole point of puppet, so let’s do that now.

For this example we are going to install a very handy apt package called ‘silversearcher-ag’ which is just a faster replacement for ack and most likely is not installed by default.

(1) Create a new folder inside of modules and call it ag. Create another folder inside of ag called manifests. This should look very similar to the previous cron-puppet folder we already created.

mkdir -p modules/ag/manifests

(2) Inside of the modules/ag/manifests folder create a file called init.pp with the following contents

class ag {
  package { 'silversearcher-ag':
    ensure => installed,
  }
}

(3) Now we need to tell puppet that we would like this module to be ran when the puppet apply command is ran. Open up the existing manifests/site.pp file and add our new module to it:

node default {
  include cron-puppet
  include ag
}

(4) Now we can commit our changes and push them do our git repo. Once the cron job runs again on our server it will pull down these changes and puppet will apply them. Once that is done you should now have access to the ag command on the server!

So I don’t think we are going to want to create a new module for every single package we are going to install, so we probably will want to pick a more generic name than ‘ag’ so that we can install multiple packages with one manifest file.

I think one of the next projects I want to work on is configuring my dev environment with puppet. I currently have a desktop and a laptop and I would like to be able to keep them in sync so that whenever I want to get work done on my laptop I can actually get work done and not have to configure it so that it is setup just like my desktop.