Welcome to our last class on Git usage. Now that we have a pre-commit hook in place, we’ll finish things up with a post-receive hook.

UPDATE: On 9/17/2014, Phil released Reaktor, an early version of which much of this article is based on. I haven’t had time to investigate but it should be easier to install and far more functional!

Post-Receive Hook

I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired of having to run r10k manually. Having to ssh to the master, log in, and run commands is so droll. What can we do about it?

A post-receive event fires when a remote push is received by the repo with the hook (i.e. when I ‘git push origin branch’, the ‘origin’ server will fire the hook) and we can use a corresponding post-receive hook to deploy for us. This is slightly trickier than a pre-commit hook because of where the event is firing. We don’t want to run it on our desktop/workstation VM, because that host would be the origin repo for everyone. We can’t want run it on the puppet master, because then our puppet master is the origin. (Technically, each repository is a fully sufficient origin repository on its own, but I’m making an assumption that you have a designated origin that’s backed up and therefore you won’t be doing the same for the other repo clones.) That leaves GitHub, which is already our designated origin. Because the post-receive event will fire on the origin, we need to ensure that Github can talk to the puppet master, which is where r10k is located.

There’s no one way to do this. My design is to implement a GitHub Web Hook, which will result in Github sending a POST to a target URL (which means GitHub needs to be able to communicate with it!) that says, “Someone just committed a change, here are the details of the change.” There’s more detail on enabling the Web Hook here. If you’re using Atlassian Stash, as we do at work, hopefully the admins have installed a plugin for web hooks (ironically, I started this documentation in March and I’m still waiting on a web hook to be installed – but if I used Github…).
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Welcome to the Puppet and Git, class 205: Git Hooks. Since we finished up talking about workflows, let’s move on and explore what a git hook is and how you can use one to improve your workflow.

Git Hooks

What is a git hook? You can read some boring official documentation, but who does that? Instead here’s a short summary: A git hook is a program that is called when a git events are triggered. These programs are usually simple shell scripts and some common events people use them with are commits. We’ll look at commits and the event that fires before the commit is completed.

Pre-Commit Hook

If you’ve been programming for more than, say, an hour, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the bad mojo that results from missing a semi-colon or curly brace or other piece of syntactical junk. And you may have even committed such a piece of broken code and pushed it upstream just to watch the whole thing fall apart. If we can lint our code, we can determine whether the code meets the syntactic requirements of a language. It’s important to note that linting doesn’t verify that your code does what it says it will do, it JUST verifies that the code will parse or compile. This would prevent the wonderful pattern of commits that looks something like:
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We’ve installed and configured r10k, are using it for deployments, and have a workflow for new modules. More commonly, we will be working on existing modules, a slightly different workflow. We can examine this new workflow by modifying the base module only.

Workflow to Modify Existing Module

Unlike adding a new module, the Puppetfile only needs to be modified to reflect the feature branch. This is where the workflows diverge: instead of requiring a merge, commit, and push, we can create a temporary branch and just delete it when we’re done. Only the module branch needs merged. We’ll show this by making a simple change, modifying Dave’s name. We have another Dave Smith who works here, so we’ll add a middle initial and the name of Dave’s organization, to prevent confusion.

The feature branch is just called dave. We’ll work on the module repo first. Make sure you’re in master and checkout the new branch. Dave’s description should be updated to “Dave G. Smith – IT Administrator” – everything will be alright unless they hire another Dave G. Smith over there. Commit the change and push it.
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Welcome back to our Puppet and Git 200-series classes. With r10k installed and configured, today we can focus on workflows. The first workflow is for a new module, either a brand new module you are creating or simply a “new to you” module, such as importing more modules from the Forge. In our classrom, we will add a single module from the forge and update the base module to make use of it. This will give us a good understanding of the workflow for r10k.

Workflow To Add A New Module

The first step in our workflow is to decided on a module to add to our setup. If you have a particular module you want to use, feel free to substitute it below. I’ve chosen saz-motd, a very simple module that is visible when installed, but will not have a material impact on your nodes. We can see right now that there is no message of the day, so we’ll know when we’re done:

[root@puppet ~]# cat /etc/motd
[root@puppet ~]#

Note: We’ll add our module to a feature branch below. It’s a simple module, so this is fine. More complex modules, such as those that include additional facts and functions, should always be installed on the master first to ensure the plugins are synchronized, which means adding them to production. This was discussed on IRC so I don’t have a link to documentation to show how this works; this is the closest I could find. I’ll mention it again when we install such a module, but I wanted to mention it in case the module you chose provides custom facts/functions.

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