You can install and configure all of PuppetDB’s components and prerequisites (including PuppetDB itself, PostgreSQL, firewall rules on RedHat-like systems, and the PuppetDB-termini for your Puppet master) using the PuppetDB module from the Puppet Forge.

• If you are already familiar with Puppet and have a working Puppet deployment, this is the easiest method for installing PuppetDB. In this guide, we expect that you already know how to assign Puppet classes to nodes.
• If you are just getting started with Puppet, you may find it easier to follow our guide to installing PuppetDB from packages.

Step 1: Enable the Puppet Platform package repository

If you haven’t done so already, you will need to do one of the following:

• Enable the Puppet Platform package repository on your PuppetDB server and Puppet master server.
• If you don’t use the Puppet Platform repository, make the PuppetDB and PuppetDB-terminus packages available via your alternate installation strategy. For the module install to succeed a command like yum install puppetdb, or the equivalent one that uses your system’s package manager, needs to be able to succeed.

Step 2: Assign classes to nodes

Using the normal methods for your site, assign the PuppetDB module’s classes to your servers. You have three main options for deploying PuppetDB:

• If you are installing PuppetDB on the same server as your Puppet master, assign the puppetdb and puppetdb::master::config classes to it.
• If you want to run PuppetDB on its own server with a local PostgreSQL instance, assign the puppetdb class to it, and assign the puppetdb::master::config class to your Puppet master. Make sure to set the class parameters as necessary.
• If you want PuppetDB and PostgreSQL to each run on their own servers, assign the puppetdb::server class and the puppetdb::database::postgresql classes to different servers, and the puppetdb::master::config class to your Puppet master. Make sure to set the class parameters as necessary.

Note: By default, the module sets up the PuppetDB dashboard to be accessible only via localhost. If you’d like to allow access to the PuppetDB dashboard via an external network interface, set the listen_address parameter on either of the puppetdb or puppetdb::server classes as follows:

class { 'puppetdb':
    listen_address => 'example.foo.com'
}

These classes automatically configure most aspects of PuppetDB. If you need to adjust additional settings (to change the node_ttl, for example), see the “Playing nice with the PuppetDB module” section of the “Configuring PuppetDB” page.

For full details on how to use the module, see the PuppetDB module documentation on Puppet Forge. The module also includes some sample manifests in the tests directory that demonstrate its basic usage.