Example42 goes to the Forge, for real

[Alessandro Franceschi]

I've finally decided to give more care to the presence on PuppetLabs's Forge of Example42 modules.

Up to now only few and outdated Example42 modules had been published to the Forge and the main, I'd say 'only', reason for that is that I couldn't find a decent way to automate the upload.

I've finally managed to cope with this thanks to MaestroDev's Blacksmith: https://github.com/maestrodev/puppet-blacksmith
Actually I tried to use it in the past but it was failing with my default ruby environment (I had 1.8.7 as rvm default).
Few words with Carlos Sanchez at the PuppetConf have driven me to the right path (use a modern ruby) and I've finally enjoying it as it deserves.

I've been uploading most of my modules on the Forge then, and would like to take the occasion to start to version them in a decent way (I have always been lazy with that) and to clean up old bugs, lints and improve spec coverage. This will be an ongoing effort but I think and hope it will pay back in the long term in terms of stability and quality of the modules.

Given this I invite you to test the installation of the Example42 modules via the puppet module tool and let me know if you find issues or dependencies problems.

An important note about dependencies, when I publish the modules on the Forge I remove programmatically the dependencies on the monitor and firewall modules, even if they might remain in the Modulefile on GitHub, as they are optional parts and bring other wider dependencies that may conflict with, for example, PuppetLabs' firewall module or others.

I would call them "optional_dependencies" and since AFAIK such a parameter still doesn't exist, I prefer not to force them.
Just know that if you want to use the automatic monitoring or firewalling features of the modules you have to explicitly install the relevant monitor or firewall modules.

Al