Puppet Show: Getting started

Puppet Show is a Ruby on Rails application that allows you to see the state of clients as they receive their compiled catalog. It will be most useful for those looking for a starting point to develop a web application to visualize their puppet environment using the stored configuration data.

Requirements

Puppet Show requires that you have puppetmasterd configured for UsingStoredConfiguration

Please note that at this time, Puppet Show and stored configuration support in puppetmasterd use separate instances of Active Record. This is a situation that will be eliminated once REST support is fully added (post 0.25.x). For now, it's recommended to use Active Record 2.0.2 (part of the Rails 2.0.2 release) for puppetmasterd. This version of Active Record currently comes bundled with Puppet Show.

Hobo 0.7.5+ is also required:

    gem install hobo

Get the code

To get the most recent code, pull it from git using:

    git clone git://reductivelabs.com/puppetshow 

Alternatively you can always get a tarball of shadoi's git repository here (click the download button): http://github.com/shadoi/puppetshow/tree/master

Update the database

Run the database migrations for puppetshow:

    cd <puppetshow checkout>
    rake production db:migrate

If you're using SQLite as the storedconfigs backend, you may need to specify dblocation in the [puppetmasterd] section of your puppet.conf. rake db:migrate will throw an error about the database being undefined if this is the case. SQLite also has issues with contention, so consider using a heftier database backend when putting Puppet and Puppet Show into production.

Start the server

By default Puppet Show uses mongrel on port 3000. To start the server run:

    cd <puppetshow checkout>
    ./script/server -e production

It will attempt to get database configuration settings from /etc/puppet/puppet.conf, if this file doesn't exist or storeconfigs = false, it will fall-back to using the default <puppetshow root>/config/database.yml

You can use -p to change the port number.

Using Puppet Show

Once mongrel has started, point your browser at http://<servername>:3000 You should see something like this:

Currently, there is an authentication and access control system in place in the code, but it is not enforced anywhere. So feel free to signup for an account, but it will have no effect on the way things work.

Navigation should be fairly obvious. If you have any questions and/or suggestions please contact shadoi in #puppet on irc.freenode.net. Or if you find a bug or want to file an enhancement request please use the Trac instance dedicated to Puppet Show: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppetshow