Learning Puppet 4

Chapter 10. Creating a Test Environment

Puppet provides the ability to serve clients different versions of modules and data using environments. You can use environments to provide unique catalogs to different groups of machines, which can be very useful in large projects with many teams. However, a primary usage of environments is to enable testing of changes to Puppet policy without breaking production environments.

Puppet environments have proven so necessary and useful for code testing and deployment that they are enabled by default in Puppet 4. So before we go on to install Puppet modules, let’s configure the production and test environments.

Verifying the Production Environment

The default environment used by Puppet clients is named production. The Puppet installation creates the production environment during the installation of Puppet. You should find that this already exists:

[vagrant@client ~]$ ls -l /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/production
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 879 Mar 26 19:27 environment.conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   6 Mar 26 19:38 hieradata
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   6 Mar 26 19:38 manifests
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   6 Mar 26 19:38 modules

The default environment is prepared with an environment configuration file, and directories for Hiera data, modules, and manifests.

Creating the Test Environment

Now let’s create a test environment you can use to test out new modules or changes to modules prior to implementing them in production. Create the environment ...