Drupal, Puppet. Puppet, meet Drupal

Puppet and Drupal make a great combination. Drupal is an amazing tool for quickly constructing attractive, functional web sites. It lets you manage large numbers of web sites from a single installation, and (via add-on modules) provides almost any CMS or blog feature you could want.

However, like any powerful tool, Drupal takes some learning. It also needs a certain amount of discipline to manage Drupal servers without getting into a chaotic mess. The Drupal sysadmin can end up trying to navigate a spaghetti of ad-hoc symlinks and face problems upgrading, maintaining, monitoring and backing up a large Drupal installation. Aegir can help with this (I'll look at Aegir vs. Puppet in a future article) but first we need to get Drupal itself under control.

Fortunately, Puppet can help you tame Drupal and use the power of configuration management to bring your Drupal sites under control. In this article I'll explain some techniques and Puppet recipes I use to manage Drupal sites and servers, including my own sites, including this one! Read more »

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 »