In an upcoming series, I’ll be writing about Puppet and Git. As part of the research, I spent a number of hours looking at existing tools for post-receive hooks that were compatible with Github and r10k. In the end, my research went a completely different way and my first effort didn’t pan out, but I did learn from the experience and thought that sharing it might help others.

I was attempting to take an integrated puppet/r10k installation supporting dynamic environments and add a post-receive hook. The current workflow finished up with having to log into the puppet master, su to root/sudo and run r10k to deploy. The primary goal of the hook was to eliminate this step. This would not only simplify the workflow, but also increase security (less people have to have root access) and eliminate mistakes (Why isn’t my change visible? Oops I forgot to run r10k). The concept of hooks is fairly simple – when certain git activities occur, programs are called – but I needed to put things together. I’m on this box, I do my git work and push it to origin, then I need origin to do … something … and tell the puppet master to do … something else.

My initial research was focused on identifying the somethings. A common solution is to install gitolite on a node and make that the origin. It can then call an external program that SSH’s to the master and runs r10k. I eliminated this option because it’s either another node to manage or another service on an existing node, plus I have to perform backups of the git repo. I’d rather use Github at home or Stash at work to foist some of those responsibilities off on others.

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