This Linux Puppet tutorial will help you install Puppet for the first time and start managing your servers. Server configuration management (CM) is big news in the IT world these days. Rightly so, because Linux automation, devops and CM tools like Puppet and Chef can save you an enormous amount of time and money and help you build a really reliable and automated Linux infrastructure. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to set up Puppet on Linux.

If you're a sysadmin, or anyone else who manages a bunch of servers, CM tools can help you create patterns or recipes which you can use to build lots of identical servers, or cloud instances, or re-use in different places and for different applications. Automating Linux servers is a snap with Puppet. Puppet can manage thousands of servers as easily as just one or two - but let's start with one or two!

If you're a developer, Linux configuration management lets you write code which describes how servers should be set up - saving you the time and effort of doing it manually, and letting you create large, load-balanced groups of interchangeable servers which are guaranteed to be identically configured.

Installing Puppet

So much for the sales pitch. Let's take a look at the steps required to get up and running with your first Puppet install (we'll come to Chef in a later article). Read more »