Malkovich

Makes it reasonably easy to develop and deploy Puppet modules using Capistrano. Also includes a convenience for Vagrant.

This is a work in progress. Currently targets Ubuntu 12.04.

Add the gem to your Gemfile:

gem 'malkovich'

and install with the bundle command. Then in your Capfile add

require 'malkovich/capistrano'

If you don't have Capfile copy it from the example below.

Use a script provisioner to create the ubuntu user with your public key.

Requires recent-ish version of Vagrant (e.g., 1.2.7).

First, initialize a VM with Ubuntu Precise:

$ vagrant init precise32 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box

Then create the shell provisioner script in .vagrant/ with:

$ cap vagrant

The vagrant task by default assumes your ssh key is in ~/.ssh/id_rsa. It will attempt to create a public key file at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub if one doesn't already exist. The key filenames can be set with private_key_filename and public_key_filename.

After the shell provisioner is written, inside the config block in your Vagrantfile add:

config.vm.provision :shell, :path => '.vagrant/shell_provisioner'

You might also set the network address for the VM so you can define the server in Capfile, for example:

config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.101.101"

Otherwise you can get it later from inside the VM using ifconfig.

Finally, boot up your Vagrant VM for the first time:

$ vagrant up

At this point, you may wish to run the bootstrap, described below.

For each stage, define a Capistrano task where you set a vaule for :stage and other values:

task :qa do
  set :stage, 'qa'
  server 'qa.myapp.com', :app, :db
end

You can make a stage for your Vagrant VM:

task :dev do
  set :stage, 'dev'
  server '192.168.101.101', :app
end

Then invoke a stage task on the Capistrano command line before any primary task, e.g.:

$ cap dev bootstrap

A bootstrap Capistrano task is provided to prepare a base image with installed Puppet. This is for Ubuntu 12.04 precise.

One approach is to run bootstrap once on a clean image, and then create a new EC2 image or Vagrant box from that. Then destroy the running machine and change your Vagrantfile to use the new image, also removing the shell provisioner.

Now you can use this new image as a starting point for Puppet module development.

For every .pp file in puppet/manifests a Capistrano task will be created in the puppet namespace. E.g., puppet/manifests/web.pp will result in the task puppet:web that can be run on stages. When puppet:web is run it will upload puppet/ to the servers with the :web role and use puppet apply to apply the web manifest.

This assumes puppet/modules is the path to the modules the manifest includes.

Specifying a stage, a server and a role is enough to let you run your puppet manifests on your server, but in many cases it is useful to make arbitrary dynamic values available to your puppet modules when they run on the server. The fact method makes this easy. For example,

task :qa do
  set :stage, 'qa'
  server 'qa.myapp.com', :app, :db
  fact :hostname, 'qa.myapp.com'
end

will make a $hostname variable available in your puppet manifests. This is achieved with Facter environment variables.

You must define at least one stage for most tasks, except for example vagrant.

Some default Capistrano values are set such as user. See defaults.rb for more. Set your own values in Capfile. These work with the Vagrant shell provisioner and Canonical EC2 images.

There are some other tasks such as uptime and upgrade. View them all with:

$ cap -T

• Capfile

load 'deploy'
require 'malkovich/capistrano'

task :qa do
  set :stage, 'qa'
  server 'qa.myapp.com', :web
  fact :hostname, 'qa.myapp.com'
end

• puppet/manifests/web.pp

include nginx

• puppet/modules/nginx/manifests/init.pp

class nginx {
  file {
    "/etc/nginx/nginx.conf":
      content => template('nginx/nginx.conf.erb')
  }
}

• puppet/modules/nginx/templates/nginx.conf.erb

http {
  server {
    server_name <%= @hostname %>; #Puppet facts become Ruby instance variables in ERB
  }
}

• Apply the manifest

$ cap qa puppet:web