Puppet, from Puppet Labs, is a configuration management tool that helps system administrators automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of a server infrastructure. This series shows you how to install a Puppet master-agent setup, write Puppet manifests (code), and use Foreman to manage your Puppet nodes.

In this tutorial, we will cover how to install open-source Puppet 4 in a master-agent setup on Ubuntu 14.04. In this setup, the Puppet master server—which runs the Puppet Server software—can be used to control all your other servers, or Puppet agent nodes. Note that we’ll be using the Puppet Server package, instead of Passenger or any other runtime environment.

After setting up Puppet in an agent/master configuration, you may need some help writing Puppet manifests and modules. In order to use Puppet effectively, you must understand how manifests and modules are constructed. This tutorial covers Puppet code basics, and will show you how to construct manifests and modules that will help you get started with using Puppet to manage your server environment.

Foreman is an open-source tool that can help with the management of servers, by providing an easy way to interact with Puppet to automate tasks and application deployment. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Foreman with Puppet, and start using it to manage your servers. We will use Foreman for its reporting and External Node Classifier (ENC) capabilities, to ease the management of Puppet.