PE 2.0 » Cloud Provisioning » Classifying and Installing

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Classifying New Nodes and Remotely Installing PE

In addition to the provisioning actions described in the prior chapters, Puppet Enterprise includes actions for adding nodes to a pre-existing console group and remotely installing Puppet Enterprise on new nodes.

Classifying nodes

Once you have created virtual machines or instances, you can add them to a group in the console right from the command line. This has the same effect as adding nodes to a group with the console’s web interface, but can be more convenient if you’re already at the command line and have the node’s name ready at hand.

To classify nodes and add them to a console group, use the puppet node classify command.

$ puppet node classify \
--node-group=appserver_pool \
--enc-server=localhost \
--enc-port=443 \
--enc-ssl \
--enc-auth-user=console \
--enc-auth-passwd=password \
ec2-50-19-149-87.compute-1.amazonaws.com

notice: Contacting https://localhost:443/ to classify
ec2-50-19-149-87.compute-1.amazonaws.com
complete

Here we’re adding an AWS EC2 instance to the console.

With the command’s options, we specify:

The --node-group we’d like to add the node to (in our case the appserver_pool group)
The console’s server
The console’s port
Whether the console uses SSL
The user name for connecting to the console
The password for connecting to the console — this user name and password were set when the console was installed

As the command’s argument, we specify the name of the node we’re classifying. If we now navigate to the console’s web interface, we can see this host has been added to the appserver_pool group.

To see additional help for node classification, run puppet help node classify. For more about how the console groups and classifies nodes, see the chapter of this manual about grouping and classifying.

Installing Puppet

Use the puppet node install command to install Puppet Enterprise (or open-source Puppet) onto new nodes.

$ puppet node install --keyfile=~/.ssh/mykey.pem --login=root ec2-50-19-207-181.compute-1.amazonaws.com 
notice: Waiting for SSH response ...
notice: Waiting for SSH response ... Done
notice: Installing Puppet ...
puppetagent_certname: ec2-50-19-207-181.compute-1.amazonaws.com-ee049648-3647-0f93-782b-9f30e387f644
status: success

With the command’s options, we specify:

An SSH key to log in with (--keyfile) — the install action uses SSH to connect to the host, and needs an SSH key. For VMware, this key should be loaded onto the template you used to create your virtual machine. For Amazon EC2, it should be the private key from the key pair you used to create the instance.
The local user account to log in as (--login).

As the command’s argument, we specify the name of the node we’re installing Puppet Enterprise on.

For the default installation, the install action uses packages provided by Puppet Labs and stored in Amazon S3 storage. You can also specify packages located on your local host, or on a share in your local network. See puppet help node install or puppet man node for more details.

In addition to these default configuration options, we can specify a number of additional options to control how and what we install on the host. We can specify the specific version of Puppet Enterprise (or we can install open source Puppet too) to install. We can also control the version of Facter to install, the specific answers file to use to configure Puppet Enterprise, the certificate name of the agent to be installed and a variety of other options. To see a full list of the available options, use the puppet help node install command.

Classifying and Installing Puppet in One Command

Rather than using multiple commands to classify and install Puppet on a node, you can use the init action, which performs both actions in a single command. For example:

$ puppet node init \
--node-group=appserver_pool \
--enc-server=localhost \
--enc-port=443 \
--enc-ssl \
--enc-auth-user=console \
--enc-auth-passwd=password \
--keyfile=~/.ssh/mykey.pem \
--login=root \
ec2-50-19-207-181.compute-1.amazonaws.com

The init action combines the options for the classify and install actions. The invocation above will connect to the console, classify the node in the appserver_pool group, and then install Puppet Enterprise on this node.