Over the past few days, I’ve been working on a project. I call it puppetinabox and it includes a consolidate controlrepo with a Puppetfile of curated collection of forge modules and config repository. If you have an existing Linux OS template and basic skills with linux and git, you can quickly deploy a network managed by puppet and r10k. This curated collection can be used as is, to learn Puppet or stand up a basic network, or fork the code and start customizing your network, using it as the foundation for a more complex configuration.

This project grew out of the 12 Days of Commitmas and my own desire to puppetize my home network. Over the holiday break, there was a lot of streaming media going on and I started to see failures on my services. Refreshing the services, which were entirely too coupled on mostly one VM, was looking pretty daunting. Puppetizing the network was slightly daunting, but far preferable to doing it by hand. I decided to put what I had learned and practiced to good use and thus, puppetinabox was born!

Puppetinabox includes everything required to provide puppet, puppetdb, r10k, dns and dhcp services, a yum repository, and a build server. The only thing you need to provide is a gateway device and you have a functional network. If you already have a working network and you want to puppetize it, never fear – you can tweak the provided material to fit or use puppetinabox to start refreshing the services one at a time.

I created the puppetinabox GitHub organization to house all the repositories. You can read the documentation here. I’d love to hear what you think, whether this will help you or what improvements might make it better. Let me know in comments, on twitter, or as a GitHub issue. If anyone is graphically inclined, I could really use a nice looking avatar for the organization, too!

If you’d like some more information, I presented on the 1/15/2015 vBrownBag DevOps Series. Watch the video and check out the slides!