PSICK

Puppet Systems Infrastructure Construction Kit

Your infrastructure control repository.

From this repository you can build your IT infrastructure and manage it via Puppet.

PSICK is a Puppet control-repo with support for different tools to manage systems provisioning:

A modern, opinionated, general purpose, full featured, reusable, customisable control-repo
Support for multiple ways to test local Puppet code (unit, integration, acceptance tests on multiple targets)
Support for different CI solutions (Gitlab, GitHub, CD4PE…)
Usable in every Puppet setup, based on Puppet Enterprise, Open Source, with or without Foreman

This control repo, among the other third party modules, uses the companion psick module which provides:

A robust interface for Hiera driven nodes classification
Ready to use profiles for common system baselines
Support for application specific psick profiles, via the psick_profile
Easy integration with common third party component modules

Sample Hiera data for the PSICK control-repo is available via the psick-hieradata module.

Setup of a new control-repo

Download this repository:

git clone https://github.com/example42/psick
cd psick
./psick create

The psick command currently it just allows you to create a new control-repo and populate it either with a bare minimal skeleton, or with the full PSICK contents.
In the future it will provide the possibility to pick single components (integrations, profiles…), see how they diff compared to your own control-repo and eventually update them on your local control-repo.

Once you have created your own control-repo, you can start to work with it.
If you have chosen to copy the full PSICK contents in your control repo, you can run the following commands from your own control-repo directory, otherwise run them from the PSICK directory.

This applies to all the scripts and paths referenced in the docs, just be aware that some of the scripts in bin/ and other integrations might not work correctly in a not full PSICK setup.

Setup of a Puppet environment

This control-repo requires Puppet 4 or later, if it’s not already installed, you can install it with this cross OS Puppet 4 install script (it uses the official Puppet repos):

sudo bin/puppet_install.sh # Only if you don't have Puppet 4 installed

Before starting to use it, you have to populate the modules/ directory of the control-repo.

You need to do this both on your development workstation, and on your Puppet server (after having placed your control-repo into the /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/ directory).

To install the prerequequisite gems (hiera-eyaml, deep_merge, r10k) and populate the external modules directory via r10k, you can run:

bin/puppet_setup.sh        # Only if you don't have the prerequisites gems

If you have already r10k and the prerequisite gems, just run:

r10k puppetfile install -v

If you also want to install the recommended (Vagrant, Docker) tools that can be used with the repo, run:

bin/setup.sh               # Only if you want to install Vagrant and Docker

The script, installs and runs r10k and then uses Puppet to install the other software.

Notes:

You will always be asked to confirm or skip each step.
The script will use sudo for the operations that need root privileges.
Scripts are mostly tested on Mac and Linux environments. On Mac some packages installations don’t work.
You can safely interrupt the scripts with CTRL+C at any time
For unattended setups (typically in CI pipelines) you can skip confirmation requests passing the argument auto:
```
  bin/puppet_setup.sh auto
  bin/setup.sh auto
```

Directory structure

PSICK has the common set of files and directories of a Puppet control-repo:

environment.conf - The Puppet environment configuration file
manifests/ - Directory with the main manifests. Here we have just site.pp
Puppetfile - File that defines the external modules to add via r10k
modules/ - Directory where modules defined in Puppetfile are placed (it’s .gitignored)
hiera.yaml - Hiera 5 environment configuration file. An equivalent Hiera 3 file is hiera3.yaml (was linked to /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml)
hieradata/ - This directory (or one called data) is usually used to store Hiera data, when is decided to keep Hiera data inside the control-repo. Since version 0.9.3 PSICK’s default datadir is loaded from a module in modules/hieradata/data.

Some extra directories are added in PSICK for integrations and tools:

bin/ - Directory containing tools and scripts for various Puppet related operations
docs/ - Directory with extra docs
site/ - An additional modules directory, with local profiles and tools.
docker/ - Files used for building Docker images for multiple OS
vagrant/ - Various Vagrant environments where is possible to test local Puppet code
.gitlab-ci.yaml - (Sample) GitLab Continuous Integration pipeline for code testing and deployment

Compatibility

PSICK compatible with every modern enough Puppet setup:

Puppet OSS 4.9 or later.
Puppet Enterprise 2017.1.0 or later

Documentation

PSICK is full of more or less hidden stuff, which ease a lot Puppet code development, testing and deployment. Here is where you can find more info:

General Puppet documentation:

Introduction to Puppet - A very basic introduction to Puppet
Hiera essentials - Basic Hiera concepts
Hiera eyaml - An overview on how to use hiera-eyaml
Trusted Facts - How to set and use trusted facts
External Facts - How to set and use external facts
Puppet Enterprise Console - An overview on the Puppet Enterprise console

About this control-repo:

Control-repo structure - A description of the control-repo structure and most important paths
Control-repo logic - An overview of the design choices and the logic of this control repo.
Prerequisites - A more detailed view of the prerequisites needed to fully use the control-repo
Noop Mode - An overview on how to manage noop and no-noop with PSICK
Vagrant Integration - How to use Vagrant to test the control-repo during development
Docker Integration - How to use Docker to test Puppet code and to build images based on the existing Puppet code

Managing changes:

Git tasks - An overview on how to use Git
Change Process - A step by step guide on how to manage changes in Puppet code