Installing Puppet

In Chapter 1, Puppet Language and Style, we installed Puppet as a rubygem using the gem install. When deploying to several nodes, this may not be the best approach. Using the package manager of your chosen distribution is the best way to keep your Puppet versions similar on all of the nodes in your deployment. Puppet labs maintain repositories for APT-based and YUM-based distributions.

Getting ready

If your Linux distribution uses APT for package management, go to http://apt.puppetlabs.com/ and download the appropriate Puppet labs release package for your distribution. For our wheezy cookbook node, we will use http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-wheezy.deb.

If you are using a Linux distribution that uses YUM for package management, go to http://yum.puppetlabs.com/ and download the appropriate Puppet labs release package for your distribution.

How to do it...

1. Once you have found the appropriate Puppet labs release package for your distribution, the steps to install Puppet are the same for either APT or YUM:
   • Install Puppet labs release package
   • Install Puppet package
2. Once you have installed Puppet, verify the version of Puppet as shown in the following example:

   t@ckbk:~ puppet --version 3.7.2
   

Now that we have a method to install Puppet on our nodes, we need to turn our attention to keeping our Puppet manifests organized. In the next section, we will see how to use Git to keep our code organized and consistent.