Getting started with Puppet Enterprise
Puppet Enterprise (PE) is automation software that helps you and your organization be productive and agile while managing your IT infrastructure.
PE is a commercial version of Puppet, our original open source product used by individuals managing smaller infrastructures. It has all the power and control of Puppet, plus a graphical user interface, orchestration services, role-based access control, reporting, and the capacity to manage thousands of nodes. PE incorporates other Puppet-related tools and products to deliver comprehensive configuration management capabilities.
There are two things you need to get started with PE: your content and the Puppet platform.
Content
You develop and store your automation content in a Git repository and upload it onto the Puppet platform. It consists of Puppet code, plan and task code, and Hiera data. You store content in a control repo, which contains bundles of code called modules and references to additional content from external sources, like the Puppet Forge — a repository of thousands of modules made by Puppet developers and the Puppet community.
Puppet platform
The Puppet platform includes the primary server, compilers, and agents. Use it to assign your desired state to managed systems, orchestrate ad-hoc automation tasks on managed and unmanaged systems, and get reports about configuration automation activity.
In this guide, you will learn how to install PE, add nodes to the console, set up your control repo, and run through an example task of managing websever configurations — using either Apache to manage a *nix machine or IIS to manage a Windows machine.
Before you begin, check out our video for more information about how Puppet works.