Over the past four weeks, I worked on a side-project to learn puppet. On my company laptop, I am running Windows 7. But that is not a well-suited environment for development. So I installed a VirtualBox running Ubuntu and all my development tools (like IntelliJ IDEA).

Some of my colleagues also got interested in this setup, so I provided them a base box with some tools already installed. But keeping that up-to-date is a tedious task. So I picked this base-box as a side-project and tried to provision this using puppet.

To kick-start the provisioning, I used vagrant.

So, I can proudly present the results of this project. I would appreciate any feed-back on this blog or on github.

How to start?

• Install Vagrant
• Clone the vagrant-dev git repository
• And run vagrant up in this directory

This should give you a running box. You still need to re-install VirtualBox guest additions and the like.

Experiences

Puppet

Puppet is an awesome tool. But I had my difficulties with it and the development process of creating modules.

• I think there are a lot of modules, on the net, you can easily use (good)
• But often, I have the feeling that these are only a starting point for your own customizations (bad)

Am not sure, if I have specific requirements, but I guess every environment is specific, but more often than not, I had the urge to modify a module in a certain way. That does not necessarily mean, that the modules are bad, they probably fulfill the requirements of their authors. But to create a re-usable module requires a lot of effort, one should not underestimate. I know this for sure, because the modules, I created are mostly not reusable. They are missing tests, do not follow conventions and should expose more parameters and customization options.

Then there are some minor work-arounds in puppet, that I do not quite understand, why they are needed. For example, to create nested directories, you need to provide an array to the files resource, because no mkdir -p is supported directly.

Beside this, I would now say, that I am confident, to be able to create puppet modules if I need to.

Vagrant

Vagrant itself was quite easy to understand and learn. But creating a base box by hand was a tedious task. You should have your checklist ready or you are doing it multiple times or you use a tool like packer.io, which was the way, I went with in the end.

Also I found an easy way to create a base box, I kept away from the preseeding. Especially, I have the impression, that partman is difficult to understand at first glance and not much material is available on the web really explaining the config parameters.

What is missing

• Tests: If you have infrastructure as code, you should also test it. Which is possible.
• Support for proxies: In many enterprises you are forced to go through a proxy (and you have to explicitly configure it). I would like to check the vagrant proxy plugin
• Provisioning of my custom / additional git scripts that make life easier, when working with git.
• Documentation (how to expand HDD in VirtualBox and Ubuntu), how to re-install Guest Additions, a decent README

What am I going to try out

• Testing
• Proxy Support
• Vagrant and multi machine deployments to allow one Oracle DB machine and a development machine.
• Setting up apt-cache and squid on my development machine to speed-up the process of looking up packages and libraries.

What is annoying

• Oracle stuff is not easily available on the web. So I skipped this for now.

More to follow…