Setting up the environment

Environments in Puppet are directories holding different versions of your Puppet manifests. Environments prior to Version 3.6 of Puppet were not a default configuration for Puppet. In newer versions of Puppet, environments are configured by default.

Whenever a node connects to a Puppet master, it informs the Puppet master of its environment. By default, all nodes report to the production environment. This causes the Puppet master to look in the production environment for manifests. You may specify an alternate environment with the --environment setting when running puppet agent or by setting environment = newenvironment in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf in the [agent] section.

Getting ready

Set the environmentpath function of your installation by adding a line to the [main] section of /etc/puppet/puppet.conf as follows:

[main]
...
environmentpath=/etc/puppet/environments

How to do it...

The steps are as follows:

1. Create a production directory at /etc/puppet/environments that contains both a modules and manifests directory. Then create a site.pp which creates a file in /tmp as follows:

   root@puppet:~# cd /etc/puppet/environments/
   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# mkdir -p production/{manifests,modules}
   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# vim production/manifests/site.pp
   node default {
    file {'/tmp/production':
    content => "Hello World!\nThis is production\n",
    }
   }
   

2. Run puppet agent on the master to connect to it and verify that the production code was delivered:

   root@puppet:~# puppet agent -vt
   Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
   Info: Retrieving plugin
   Info: Caching catalog for puppet
   Info: Applying configuration version '1410415538'
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[default]/File[/tmp/production]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}f7ad9261670b9da33a67a5126933044c'
   Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.04 seconds
   # cat /tmp/production
   Hello World!
   This is production
   

3. Configure another environment devel. Create a new manifest in the devel environment:

   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# mkdir -p devel/{manifests,modules}
   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# vim devel/manifests/site.pp
   node default {
    file {'/tmp/devel':
    content => "Good-bye! Development\n",
    }
   }
   

4. Apply the new environment by running the --environment devel puppet agent using the following command:

   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# puppet agent -vt --environment devel
   Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
   Info: Retrieving plugin
   Info: Caching catalog for puppet
   Info: Applying configuration version '1410415890'
   Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[default]/File[/tmp/devel]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}b6313bb89bc1b7d97eae5aa94588eb68'
   Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.04 seconds
   root@puppet:/etc/puppet/environments# cat /tmp/devel
   Good-bye! Development
   

Tip

You may need to restart apache2 to enable your new environment, this depends on your version of Puppet and the environment_timeout parameter of puppet.conf.

There's more...

Each environment can have its own modulepath if you create an environment.conf file within the environment directory. More information on environments can be found on the Puppet labs website at https://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/environments.html.