Rump

Rump helps you run Puppet locally against a Git checkout.

Rump encourages a Puppet workflow where you quickly + iteratively develop your Puppet manifests on a single machine, then push your changes up to a repository to deploy to the rest of your infrastructure.

This workflow also complements a Capistrano or MCollective-style deployment, where you remotely instruct Rump to check out a copy of the latest manifests and run them.

Rump also has the ability to freeze Puppet in to the manifests repository, letting you quickly test different versions of Puppet without waiting for packages to appear, and reducing the dependencies on a system to run Puppet down to just Ruby and git.

Installing

$ gem install rump

Using Rump

Make sure you check out the man pages.

Check out your repository of Puppet manifests:

$ rump clone [email protected]:me_at_example_dot_org/puppet.git

You'll want to set up a ~/.gitconfig in your home directory so you know who's making changes:

[user]
name = My Name
email = me@example.org

[push]
default = matching

When you make changes, run Puppet through Rump:

$ sudo rump go

You can append options you'd normally pass to the puppet command at the end of rump go:

$ sudo rump go --verbose --debug --noop

There's nothing stopping you from running Rump against different checkouts/branches of manifests. This is especially powerful when developing locally with the following workflow:

rump clone [email protected]:me_at_example_dot_org/puppet.git
rump go
cd puppet && git checkout -b new_feature
Make your changes && rump go --noop to see what will change.
Apply the changes with rump go
Iterate until everything's working
git checkout master && git merge new_feature
git push

Freezing Puppet

If you are using Git, you can freeze Puppet into your project as a submodule. This gives you a whole bunch of advantages:

You only need Ruby installed on your system to run Puppet
A checkout of your manifests also gives you Puppet
Bind your manifests to a particular version of Puppet
Test your manifests against new versions of Puppet in a separate branch
Manage upgrades of Puppet outside your operating system's release cycle

You can freeze Puppet very easily:

$ rump freeze

This will freeze Puppet + Facter under vendor/. Alternatively, you can point the freezer at any Git repository (local or remote).

When you run rump go, it checks whether you have frozen Puppet + Facter, and runs the frozen Puppet if available.

You can also freeze in arbitrary Git repos:

$ rump freeze moonshine git://github.com/railsmachine/moonshine.git

These will automatically be added to the load path when you run rump go

Testing Rump

There's a suite of Cucumber tests to fully exercise Rump in features/:

$ cucumber features/

The scenarios are tagged with @offline and @online, depending on whether the test requires internet connectivity. Run all but @online tests with:

$ cucumber --tags ~@online features/

Quirks