Puppeteer

Test your puppet modules in a Docker container on a variety of OS'es (currently only ones that use the apt package manager).

Using it

You need Docker to use this tool.

• Put your puppet repos in a common folder and set PUPPET_HOME to point to this folder (defaults to $HOME/puppet).

• Write a manifest to be applied to the container.

• Run

    $ ./run.sh <docker-base-image> <puppet-manifest>
  

You can use the convenience scripts wheezy.sh, jessie.sh and stretch.sh to skip the first argument if you're targeting either of the debian:wheezy, debian:jessie or debian:stretch docker base images

Test your setup

$ ./jessie.sh manifests/test.pp

Example

Given we have defined a puppet module in $PUPPET_HOME/my_puppet_stuff/modules/rabbitmq/manifests/init.pp for installing RabbitMQ. The module takes two parameters on initialization: username and password. To test this module we then define a manifest describing the default node:

node default {
  class { 'rabbitmq':
    username => 'rabbit',
    password => 'rabbit'
  }
}

and we save this in manifests/rabbitmq_test.pp in the puppeteer directory. The contents of this directory is on the git ignore list, so don't worry about cluttering it with your own test manifests. You can of course save your test manifests in any directory you want to.

Now by running

$ ./jessie.sh manifests/rabbitmq_test.pp

a debian:jessie-based Docker container will be built and run and the rabbitmq puppet module will be applied to this container from within using puppet apply. When puppet is done you will be dropped to a bash shell in the container for inspecting the state of the container.

Since Docker base images are much smaller (have less packages pre-installed) than the standard OS distributions, you will likely run into situations, where you have relied on the OS distribution to install certain packages, that will not be available in the smaller Docker base image. In this case, you will either have to build your own base images that contain the packages, that your server environment has out-of-the-box from the OS distribution, or you have to build a more elaborate puppet setup and check for packages that are pre-installed in you server environment but is not part of the Docker base image corresponding to that environment.

Beware that the manifest you're testing will be copied to the puppeteer directory as default.pp and will overwrite any previous version of that file.