Kikanny <kika...@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm a puppet noob and I've been tinkering with it for the past couple of
> weeks. What I would like to do now is duplicate a web server. So I have a
> web server running.
...and not built with puppet, right?
> I would like to make puppet to duplicate this web server on another
> machine. This includes installing the same packages, have the same directory
> structure, have the same repository, etc., on the new server. I'm really not
> sure how to proceed with this. Any starting tips would be greatly
> appreciated!
Well, the sad thing is that puppet is going to make this specific job harder
than just sitting down and doing it all by hand. Which, I imagine, is not the
news you wanted to hear. :)
On the plus side: it will make the *next* web server, after this one, really
easy. Like, five minutes of work easy.
Basically, what you need to do is go through your existing web server and for
every single thing that is custom — every package, every path, every repo —
and tell puppet how to put it in place.
Which means that you get to do all the work you would have to do for
creating a new one by hand, only now you also get to tell puppet how to do it
and build a bit of stuff around that.
There isn't any much shortcut to getting through this[1], and it usually takes
about ten or twenty percent more time than just doing it would once you know
puppet. Budget a little more on top of that for learning puppet.
What you really get benefits from is that a whole bunch of that work will be
the same stuff you want on a file server, or a database server, or whatever.
So, building one of those, or reusing it to build another web server after
this one, is super-easy and much faster.
Daniel
Plus, now you can make *both* web servers run the same puppet stuff, so when
you fix a problem or make a new website on one you can have the other pick it
up exactly the same (or as different) as you want.
Footnotes:
[1] ...though you might want to investigate the ralsh tool, shipped with
puppet, which might make some of the manual work easier.
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✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ dan...@rimspace.net ☎ +61 401 155 707
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