Librarian-puppet

Introduction

Librarian-puppet is a bundler for your puppet infrastructure. You can use librarian-puppet to manage the puppet modules your infrastructure depends on. It is based on Librarian, a framework for writing bundlers, which are tools that resolve, fetch, install, and isolate a project's dependencies.

Librarian-puppet manages your modules/ directory for you based on your Puppetfile. Your Puppetfile becomes the authoritative source for what modules you require and at what version, tag or branch.

Once using Librarian-puppet you should not modify the contents of your modules directory. The individual modules' repos should be updated, tagged with a new release and the version bumped in your Puppetfile.

The Puppetfile

Every Puppet repository that uses Librarian-puppet will have a file named Puppetfile in the root directory of that repository. The full specification for which modules your puppet infrastructure repository depends goes in here.

Example Puppetfile

forge "http://forge.puppetlabs.com"

mod "puppetlabs/razor"
mod "puppetlabs/ntp", "0.0.3"

mod "apt",
  :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apt.git"

mod "stdlib",
  :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib.git"

See jenkins-appliance for a puppet repo already setup to use librarian-puppet.

Puppetfile Breakdown

forge "http://forge.puppetlabs.com"

This declares that we want to use the official Puppet Labs Forge as our default source when pulling down modules. If you run your own local forge, you may want to change this.

mod "puppetlabs/razor"

Pull in the latest version of the Puppet Labs Razor module from the default source.

mod "puppetlabs/ntp", "0.0.3"

Pull in version 0.0.3 of the Puppet Labs NTP module from the default source.

mod "apt",
  :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apt.git"

Our puppet infrastructure repository depends on the apt module from the Puppet Labs GitHub repos and checks out the master branch.

mod "apt",
  :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apt.git",
  :ref => '0.0.3'

Our puppet infrastructure repository depends on the apt module from the Puppet Labs GitHub repos and checks out a tag of 0.0.3.

mod "apt",
  :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-apt.git",
  :ref => 'feature/master/dans_refactor'

Our puppet infrastructure repository depends on the apt module from the Puppet Labs GitHub repos and checks out the dans_refactor branch.

When using a Git source, we do not have to use a :ref =>. If we do not, then librarian-puppet will assume we meant the master branch.

If we use a :ref =>, we can use anything that Git will recognize as a ref. This includes any branch name, tag name, SHA, or SHA unique prefix. If we use a branch, we can later ask Librarian-puppet to update the module by fetching the most recent version of the module from that same branch.

The Git source also supports a :path => option. If we use the path option, Librarian-puppet will navigate down into the Git repository and only use the specified subdirectory. Some people have the habit of having a single repository with many modules in it. If we need a module from such a repository, we can use the :path => option here to help Librarian-puppet drill down and find the module subdirectory.

mod "apt",
  :git => "git://github.com/fake/puppet-modules.git",
  :path => "modules/apt"

Our puppet infrastructure repository depends on the apt module, which we have stored as a directory under our puppet-modules git repos.

How to Use

Install librarian-puppet:

$ gem install librarian-puppet

Prepare your puppet infrastructure repository:

$ cd ~/path/to/puppet-inf-repos
$ (git) rm -rf modules
$ librarian-puppet init

Librarian-puppet takes over your modules/ directory, and will always reinstall (if missing) the modules listed the Puppetfile.lock into your modules/ directory, therefore you do not need your modules/ directory to be tracked in Git.

Librarian-puppet uses a .tmp/ directory for tempfiles and caches. You should not track this directory in Git.

Running librarian-puppet init will create a skeleton Puppetfile for you as well as adding tmp/ and modules/ to your .gitignore.

$ librarian-puppet install [--clean] [--verbose]

This command looks at each mod declaration and fetches the module from the source specified. This command writes the complete resolution into Puppetfile.lock and then copies all of the fetched modules into your modules/ directory, overwriting whatever was there before.

Get an overview of your Puppetfile.lock with:

$ librarian-puppet show

Inspect the details of specific resolved dependencies with:

$ librarian-puppet show NAME1 [NAME2, ...]

Find out which dependencies are outdated and may be updated:

$ librarian-puppet outdated [--verbose]

Update the version of a dependency:

$ librarian-puppet update apt [--verbose]
$ git diff Puppetfile.lock
$ git add Puppetfile.lock
$ git commit -m "bumped the version of apt up to 0.0.4."

How to Contribute

• Pull requests please.
• Bonus points for feature branches.

Reporting Issues

Bug reports to the github issue tracker please. Please include:

• Relevant Puppetfile and Puppetfile.lock files
• Version of ruby, librarian-puppet
• What distro
• Please run the librarian-puppet commands in verbose mode by using the --verbose flag, and include the verbose output in the bug report as well.

Changelog

0.9.0

• Initial release

0.9.1

• Proper error message when a module that is sourced from the forge does not exist.
• Added support for annotated tags as git references.
• librarian-puppet init adds .tmp/ to gitignore instead of tmp/.
• Fixed syntax error in the template Puppetfile created by librarian-puppet init.
• Checks for lib/puppet as well as manifests/ when checking if the git repository is a valid module.
• When a user specifies <foo>/<bar> as the name of a module sources from a git repository, assume the module name is actually <bar>.
• Fixed gem description and summary in gemspec.

License

Please see the LICENSE file.