Puppet Provisioning

Provisioner key: :puppet

Puppet allows you to provision your virtual machines with Puppet manifests. It runs in a stand-alone mode that doesn’t require a Puppet server.

This page will not go into the details of creating Puppet manifests, since that is covered in detail around the web, but a good place to start is the Puppet Labs Docs site.

Setting the Manifests Path

First, Vagrant needs to know where the Puppet manifests are located. By default, Vagrant will look in the manifests directory relative to the root of the project directory (where the project’s Vagrantfile is located). In addition to knowing where to find the manifests, Puppet needs to know the name of the file to run.

Both the file and path can be configured using the manifest_file and manifests_path options in your Vagrantfile configuration file. For example:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :puppet do |puppet|
    puppet.manifests_path = "manifests"
    puppet.manifest_file = "my_manifest.pp"
  end
end

The manifests path will be expanded relative to the directory where the Vagrantfile is.

This is all that is needed if you only use basic manifests.

Modules

Modules provide a way to encapsulate Puppet files (resources, definitions, classes, etc.) into a single redistributable package.

The Vagrant Puppet provisioner allows you to mount a local folder of modules onto the VM, and will configure Puppet to be aware of them, automatically.

For example, if you have a folder named “my_modules” with a bunch of modules in the same folder as your Vagrantfile, you can mount them like so:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :puppet, :module_path => "my_modules"
end

The module path is expanded relative to the folder containing the Vagrantfile. You may of course also put absolute paths in place. You may also specify an array of module folders.

Now, let’s say there is an “apache” module in your “my_modules” folder. You can now use it in your manifest file:

include apache

When the provisioner runs, it will automatically mount your modules folder and configure Puppet to know where they are so they can be loaded.

Setting Additional Options

You can also specify additional options to be passed to Puppet using the options variable.

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :puppet, :options => ["--modulepath", "modules"]
end

You can also pass options as strings:

  config.vm.provision :puppet, :options => "--verbose --debug"

Overriding Facts

Puppet uses Facter to quickly gather information about the nodes that Puppet runs on. Sometimes, for testing or because you don’t like what Facter determined, you want to override the values that it collects. Vagrant exposes an easy way to do this:

  config.vm.provision :puppet, :facter => { "operatingsystem" => "Debian" }

The above will override the $operatingsystem variable that you normally get access to in Puppet manifests from Facter with “Debian.”

Configuring the Puppet Provisioning Path

In order to run Puppet, Vagrant has to mount the specified manifests directory as a shared folder on the virtual machine. By default, this is set to be /tmp/vagrant-puppet, and this should be fine for most users. But in the case that you need to customize the location, you can do so in the Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :puppet, :pp_path = "/tmp/vagrant-puppet"
end

This folder is created for provisioning purposes and destroyed once provisioning is complete.