How to create node groups in puppet

puppet

I am in the process of setting up Puppet in our QA environment. I have created a few manifests and setup classes which are running fine. I am aware of Node definitions and have successfully created manifests to apply on a few nodes using node definition. But I am yet to figure out how to put a group of nodes into a group so that I can use the groupname instead of having to specify each nodes in the node definition. This URL to the puppetlabs document seem to talk only about group creation in Puppet Enterprise version. How do I create groups in community version?

This is my current nodes.pp file.

[root@puppet modules]# cat /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes.pp
node "saturn.qa1.example.com", "mercury.qa1.example.com" {
      include qa1check
}

Best Answer

You can't.

Either you use regexes for the node name, or roll your own External Node Classifier (ENC) that lets you this in a simplified fashion.

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Referencing groups/classes from Puppet dashboard in the site manifest

You are on the right track with the External Node Classifier. It is a bit difficult to wrap your head around, but one you get it working you will never look back and I cannot recommend doing it strongly enough. I went to the puppet IRC room when i had trouble and they helped me get mine working.

Applying different modules based on OS is fine. I run a 300+ node environment with BSD and RHEL and we do it. Instead of having the the OS be a node, we have it as own class because . So instead of "node OS inherits basenode", we do have the ENC pass back something like this:
```
node web-prod-007 {
  $node_environment="production"
  include web_server_class # this then inherits basenode
  include centos6::server # 
  include logging::rsyslog 
}
```
...etc

how you do it depends on how you want your inheritance to work, if you want to modify the things in basenode depending on operating system, then having OS inherit basenode is the right way to go.

TLDR, what you are doing is okay, and look into ENC's because they make life easier.

EDIT: 2. I dont use Dashboard so I dont know.

Linux – Puppet error when testing manifest

I posted it over at http://ask.puppetlabs.com as suggested by Sirex in chat. It was pointed out that I had renamed the file module manifest to users.pp, but it should have been init.pp as per the automatic loading of classes and subclasses that is built into Puppet.

Best Answer

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Referencing groups/classes from Puppet dashboard in the site manifest

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