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.

Check out this video for more information about how Puppet works:

Quick start guide

The following pages are meant to teach you the basics of installing PE, adding nodes to your inventory, setting up your control repo, and running through an example task for managing websever configurations (using Apache to manage a *nix machine or IIS to manage a Windows machine).

Note: This guide is intended as a simple overview to demonstrate basic PE setup and concepts. You'll likely use more features and need additional customizations described in detail elsewhere in the PE documentation.