The Puppet platform
Puppet is made up of several packages.
Together these are called the Puppet platform, which
is what you use to manage, store and run your Puppet
code. These packages include puppetserver
,
puppetdb
, and puppet-agent
— which includes
Facter and Hiera.
To install these packages, see the Installing Puppet page. To understand what versions are maintained and go together when upgrading and troubleshooting, view the Puppet platform lifecycle page.
-
PuppetDB
All of the data generated by Puppet (for example facts, catalogs, reports) is stored in PuppetDB. -
Facter
Facter is Puppet’s cross-platform system profiling library. It discovers and reports per-node facts, which are available in your Puppet manifests as variables. -
Hiera
Hiera is a built-in key-value configuration data lookup system, used for separating data from Puppet code. -
Environments
Environments are isolated groups of agent nodes. -
Important directories and files
Puppet consists of a number of directories and files, and each one has an important role ranging from Puppet code storage and configuration files to manifests and module paths. -
Puppet services and tools
Puppet provides a number of core services and administrative tools to manage systems with or without a primary Puppet server, and to compile configurations for Puppet agents. -
Custom functions
Use the Puppet language, or the Ruby API to create custom functions. -
Classifying nodes
You can classify nodes using an external node classifier (ENC), which is a script or application that tells Puppet which classes a node must have. It can replace or work in concert with the node definitions in the main site manifest (site.pp
). -
Puppet reports
Puppet creates a report about its actions and your infrastructure each time it applies a catalog during a Puppet run. You can create and use report processors to generate insightful information or alerts from those reports. -
Built-in report processors
-
Puppet's internals
Learn the details of Puppet's internals, including how primary servers and agents communicate via host-verified HTTPS, and about the process of catalog compilation.