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Puppet Fundamentals

Puppet is a configuration management system that describes how machines should be configured. It compiles that policy into a catalog for each node, then corrects packages, files, services, and other resources that differ from the catalog.

itInfrastructure and operations

Puppet Fundamentals

Puppet manages system configuration as desired state. You describe the outcome you want. Puppet compares that policy with a node and changes the node when its state differs.

The central unit is a resource. A resource can represent a package, file, service, user, scheduled job, or another manageable part of a system. Each resource has a type, a title, attributes, and a desired state.

package { 'nginx':
  ensure => installed,
}

service { 'nginx':
  ensure => running,
  enable => true,
}

This code does not list every shell command required on every platform. The resource provider handles platform-specific work. Your policy stays focused on the result.

The catalog is the contract

A manifest is a Puppet language file with a .pp extension. Manifests can contain resources, classes, functions, and conditional logic for many nodes.

A catalog is different. It is the compiled, node-specific document that lists resources and their dependency relationships for one node. Conditional logic has already been resolved before the agent applies the catalog.

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