Puppet Types and Providers

Appendix A. Installing Puppet

The book assumes that users have installed Facter and Puppet from source in their ~/src directory.

This section walks through the process of installing the following:

• Ruby
• Facter and Puppet

Installing Ruby

In general, Linux distributions provide Ruby 1.8.7, which can be installed as a system package. Earlier versions of Ruby 1.8 should be avoided due to performance issues and known bugs. Puppet 3.0 officially supports Ruby 1.9.x series—however, it is only available on the latest distributions.

Note

As of the publication date of this book, using Puppet 3.0 with Ruby 1.9.3 contains enough known issues that it should be avoided. This is likely to be fixed in the near future.

The following commands are sufficient for installing ruby and rubygems on Redhat- and Debian-based systems:

$ apt-get install ruby rubygems

$  yum install ruby rubygems

Note

Installing Ruby from a package is sufficient if you only need to support a single Ruby environment. RVM is recommended for more complicated setups and in general for development with Ruby. It allows multiple versions of Ruby to be installed on the same system, and provides the ability to isolate specific sets of gems to different environments using gemsets. More information on RVM can be found here.

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby

rvm install 1.8.7
rvm install 1.9.3

Installing Facter and Puppet

PuppetLabs provides the following package repositories for the latest stable version of Puppet and Facter, which ...