Some time ago I wrote how to reuse Puppet providers in your Ruby script, I’ll take that a bit further here and show you to create any kind of resource.
Puppet works based on resources and catalogs. A catalog is a collection of resources and it will apply the catalog to a machine. So in order to do something you can do as before and call the type’s methods directly but if you wanted to build up a resource and say ‘just do it’ then you need to go via a catalog.
Here’s some code, I don’t know if this is the best way to do it, I dug around the code for ralsh to figure this out:
params = { :name => "rip", :comment => "R.I.Pienaar", :password => '......' } pup = Puppet::Type.type(:user).new(params) catalog = Puppet::Resource::Catalog.new catalog.add_resource pup catalog.apply |
That’s really simple and doesn’t require you to know much about the inner workings of a type, you’re just mapping the normal Puppet manifest to code and applying it. Nifty.
The natural progression – to me anyway – is to put this stuff into a MCollective agent and build a distributed ralsh.
Here’s a sample use case, I wanted to change my users password everywhere:
$ mc-rpc puppetral do type=user name=rip password='$1$xxx' |
And that will go out, find all my machines and use the Puppet RAL to change my password for me. You can do anything puppet can, manage /etc/hosts, add users, remove users, packages, services and anything even your own custom types can be used. Distributed and in parallel over any number of hosts.
Some other examples:
Add a user:
$ mc-rpc puppetral do type=user name=foo comment="Foo User" managehome=true |
Run a command using exec, with the magical creates option:
$ mc-rpc puppetral do type=exec name="/bin/date > /tmp/date" user=root timeout=5 creates="/tmp/date" |
Add an aliases entry:
$ mc-rpc puppetral do type=mailalias name=foo recipient="rip@devco.net" target="/etc/aliases" |
Install a package:
$ mc-rpc puppetral do type=package name=unix2dos ensure=present |
