Higher Logic notes on screwing with tech…

Vagrant + VirtualBox + Puppet on OSX (Rapid puppet testing)

Hello,

I'm a massive fan of Puppet, its made my life so easy. At the same time Puppet is very powerful when you give it full control of your entire systems. One of the things thats been lacking in my environments has been the ability to quickly test Puppet code destined for production and see how it fares. This is where Vagrant and VirtualBox comes in :D

Quickly, quickly I need to be somewhere else


# (Optional) Homebrew which gives you access to useful packages.
Download and install Homebrew
# VirtualBox which is kinda fundamental to this.
Download and install VirtualBox
# Installs vagrant, puppet and puppet-line (puppet style checker)
sudo gem install vagrant puppet puppet-lint --no-ri --no-rdoc
# Downloads a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS image to work off (google for your poison)
sudo vagrant box add precise64 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise64.box
# It also sets the correct permissions to run vagrant
sudo chown -R localuser ~/.vagrant.d


I choose to install vagrant, puppet and co through gems because there's enough package management crap on my system as it is without me introducing more pain :)

Can I do something now


# This is the folder you want to work one set of VM's out of
mkdir vm_working_dir
# Let Vagrant do some magic
vagrant init
# Edit the VagrantFile (see below)
# Add a bash file (see below)


Add a bash file to setup basic stuff on my new 12.04 LTS

#!/bin/bash
hostname xxx
apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade -y
apt-get -y install puppet


This is powerful because you can set the hostname to which ever box in production you would like to mimic/test.

Edit VagrantFile to look like this:

# This refers which base image to use, our previous downloaded precise64
Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
config.vm.box = "precise64"
end

# I pointed module_path to my local modules folder.
# I setup a custom facter fact to set vagrant variable (useful, more later).
# I pointed the manifest file at the top level puppet file so it includes my whole tree.
config.vm.provision :puppet, :facter => { "vagrant" => "true" }, :module_path => "~/puppet/modules" do |puppet|
puppet.manifests_path = "~/puppet/manifests"
puppet.manifest_file = "site.pp"
end


Lets fire this baby up...


cd vm_working_dir
# starts up vagrant and new base image the very first time
vagrant up
# If your VagrantFile is correct, it will:
# Copy the precise64 to start your local image
# Setup fundamental networking
# Run the bash script on it once its up
# Run the node against my own puppet manifests based on its own hostname

# once its all fired up
vagrant ssh (this drops you onto the box)
# Shuts down the box once you are done all state is preserved for later use
vagrant halt


Explain damn you!

I prefer running it just on my local puppet files rather than through another local puppet server + new server CA + new client cert + *vomit*...

The reason I added my own Puppet facter fact is because you don't want your local vagrant box applying production network/security settings that might prevent "vagrant ssh" to work.

Now that this is setup, you can just run Vagrant destroy + Vagrant up to build a box from base OS image.

If running a full base build is too time consuming and unnecessary just shutdown using vagrant halt and vagrant up to apply the latest changes...

Useful stuff


# This will start you up from scratch and destroy anything puppet and bash script did
vagrant destroy
# This will delete the image you downloaded...
vagrant box remove precise64


http://puppet-lint.com/

http://rspec-puppet.com/

Let me know if I've missed anything.

When I get a chance i'll put up an article on puppet continuous build and release. I <3 Vagrant!