Practical Puppet at MWRC

**update** The underlying repos changed so the demo won’t work from the user data. It will still work after running ‘apt-get update’ on the box. If I get bored I might repackaged it.

*update*  Confreaks has my MWRC video up. The notes below about launching on EC2 are probably still useful for context.

These are my slides from Mountain West Ruby Conf.

Starts with a little intro about the beginning of computing, before ‘computer science’, driven by desire for computation in math and physics, when there wasn’t a division between the people that program and people that understand how the systems work. (this period probably lasted for about 10 minutes.)

Then some Puppet code…

These modules will build passenger and install rails.

Finishes with a short discussion on the tribes, trading ideas, evolutions, the opportunity of clouds and encouraging people to do something awesome.

The talk was given with a live demo of this code building rails in EC2.

You can do it too if you have an EC2 account.

Start ami-2b10f742 littleidea/mwrcpuppetrailsdemo.manifest.xml sending this as the user data:

#!/usr/bin/env puppet

rails::site{ the_next_big_thing:
servername => "www.tnbt.com",
rails_version => "2.2.2"
}

Set the server name and the rails version to whatever you want.

If you need more gems or packages you can add:

#for gems
package { gemname:
    ensure => installed,
    provider => gem
}

#for native packages
package { pgkname:
    ensure => installed,
}

If you need a certain version of a gem or package, change ‘installed’ to the version you want (the default will install the latest available.)

The image is based on ami-7cfd1a15 Ubuntu Intrepid packaged by Eric Hammond with puppet and facter installed. The puppet manifests from the slides are modules found in /usr/share/puppet/modules.

When the ami starts up it will grab the user data and run it.

You can also ssh to your instance and just put the puppet code in a file (strip the #! /usr/bin/puppet) and run puppet –debug to watch it build.

puppet --debug mysite.pp