Newer to puppet, looking for ways to organize and group configs

[JakeJ]

Hi all, 

I've just inherited a puppet environment that is currently managing various linux and OS X nodes. This appears to me to be a non-traditional Puppet environment, as it seems the previous group of employees have built in-house, a web app that allows us to manage the puppet nodes by placing them into groups and assign groups a certain configuration of modules, I believe the puppet master looks to the web app at each check-in to get a list of modules to maintain on the node. Sadly, none of those employees are currently here anymore, and the documentation is lacking, to say the least. The web app built is getting a bit long in the tooth and is falling apart slowly. I'm looking for an alternative that would work with our already in-place puppet master and PuppetDB. 

Is this where tools such as Foreman and Puppet Dashboard come in? I feel like this can't be an uncommon request..I have distinct modules that I want to group together for various nodes, for example, we have a "base servers" module, which installs common applications and sets a user account, and we have "nginx" "apache" "postgres" modules that would also be applied, depending on the group the server is placed in. Similar for the OS X nodes, where they will have a different puppet config if the are "office" compared to "lab" groups. Surely there is a supported open-source tool that does this? 

Best,

Jake 

[Wil Cooley]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 7:47 AM, JakeJ <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, 

I've just inherited a puppet environment that is currently managing various linux and OS X nodes. This appears to me to be a non-traditional Puppet environment, as it seems the previous group of employees have built in-house, a web app that allows us to manage the puppet nodes by placing them into groups and assign groups a certain configuration of modules, I believe the puppet master looks to the web app at each check-in to get a list of modules to maintain on the node. Sadly, none of those employees are currently here anymore, and the documentation is lacking, to say the least. The web app built is getting a bit long in the tooth and is falling apart slowly. I'm looking for an alternative that would work with our already in-place puppet master and PuppetDB. 

The web app you describe sounds like an ENC - external node classifier: https://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/external_nodes.html

 

Is this where tools such as Foreman and Puppet Dashboard come in? I feel like this can't be an uncommon request..I have distinct modules that I want to group together for various nodes, for example, we have a "base servers" module, which installs common applications and sets a user account, and we have "nginx" "apache" "postgres" modules that would also be applied, depending on the group the server is placed in. Similar for the OS X nodes, where they will have a different puppet config if the are "office" compared to "lab" groups. Surely there is a supported open-source tool that does this? 

Yes, both Foreman and Puppet Dashboard can be used as an ENC.

Wil