Puppetboard

Puppetboard is a web interface to PuppetDB aiming to replace the reporting functionality of Puppet Enterprise console (previously: Puppet Dashboard) for the open source Puppet.

(See more screenshots here.)

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
• Configuration
• Getting Help
• Contributing

Requirements

• PuppetDB v. 3.0-6.0 (it may work with newer but this has not been verified)
• Python 3.6/3.7/3.8

Installation

Puppetboard is packaged and available on PyPi.

With Puppet module

There is a Puppet module originally written by Spencer Krum and currently maintained by Voxpupuli that takes care of installing the Puppetboard for you.

To see how to get it working with RedHat/Centos 7 check out these docs.

From a package

Actively maintained packages:

OS	Status
OpenBSD	available	Maintained by Sebastian Reitenbach

Using Docker

Please see camptocamp/puppetboard on DockerHub for a maintained Docker image with the app.

We also provide the Dockerfile so you can build the image yourself. You can build it and run it with:

$ docker build -t puppetboard .

$ docker run -it -p 9080:80 -v /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl:/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl \
  -e PUPPETDB_HOST=<hostname> \
  -e PUPPETDB_PORT=8081 \
  -e PUPPETDB_SSL_VERIFY=/etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/ssl/ca.pem \
  -e PUPPETDB_KEY=/etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/ssl/private.pem \
  -e PUPPETDB_CERT=/etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/ssl/public.pem \
  -e INVENTORY_FACTS='Hostname,fqdn, IP Address,ipaddress' \
  -e ENABLE_CATALOG=True \
  -e GRAPH_FACTS='architecture,puppetversion,osfamily' \
  puppetboard

Manually

To install it simply issue the following command:

$ pip install puppetboard

This will install Puppetboard and take care of the dependencies. If you do this Puppetboard will be installed in the so called site-packages or dist-packages of your Python distribution.

The complete path on Debian and Ubuntu systems would be /usr/local/lib/pythonX.Y/lib/dist-packages/puppetboard and on Fedora would be /usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/puppetboard where X and Y are replaced by your major and minor python versions.

You will need this path in order to configure your HTTPD and WSGI-capable application server.

Please see an article about more deployment setups here.

Configuration

PuppetDB

Of course you need to configure your Puppet Server to store the Puppet run reports in PuppetDB. If you haven't done that already please follow the PuppetDB documentation about this.

If you run Puppetboard on a different host than PuppetDB then you may want to configure the certificate allow-list for which certificates are allowed to access data from PuppetDB. Please read more about this feature in the PuppetDB documentation here.

App settings

Puppetboard will look for a file pointed at by the PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS environment variable. The file has to be identical to default_settings.py but should only override the settings you need changed.

If you run PuppetDB and Puppetboard on the same machine the default settings provided will be enough to get you started and you won't need a custom settings file.

Assuming your webserver and PuppetDB machine are not identical you will at least have to change the following settings:

• PUPPETDB_HOST
• PUPPETDB_PORT

By default PuppetDB requires SSL to be used when a non-local client wants to connect. Therefore you'll also have to supply the following settings:

• PUPPETDB_SSL_VERIFY = /path/to/ca/keyfile.pem
• PUPPETDB_KEY = /path/to/private/keyfile.pem
• PUPPETDB_CERT = /path/to/public/keyfile.crt

For information about how to generate the correct keys please refer to the pypuppetdb documentation. Alternatively it is possible to explicitly specify the protocol to be used setting the PUPPETDB_PROTO variable.

Other settings that might be interesting in no particular order:

• SECRET_KEY: Refer to Flask documentation, section "How to generate good secret keys" for more info. Defaults to a random 24-char string generated by os.random(24).
• PUPPETDB_TIMEOUT: Defaults to 20 seconds but you might need to increase this value. It depends on how big the results are when querying PuppetDB. This behaviour will change in a future release when pagination will be introduced.
• UNRESPONSIVE_HOURS: The amount of hours since the last check-in after which a node is considered unresponsive.
• LOGLEVEL: A string representing the loglevel. It defaults to 'info' but can be changed to 'warning' or 'critical' for less verbose logging or 'debug' for more information.
• ENABLE_QUERY: Defaults to True causing a Query tab to show up in the web interface allowing users to write and execute arbitrary queries against a set of endpoints in PuppetDB. Change this to False to disable this. See ENABLED_QUERY_ENDPOINTS to fine-tune which endpoints are allowed.
• ENABLED_QUERY_ENDPOINTS: If ENABLE_QUERY is True, allow to fine tune the endpoints of PuppetDB APIs that can be queried. It must be a list of strings of PuppetDB endpoints for which the query is enabled. See the QUERY_ENDPOINTS constant in the puppetboard.app module for a list of the available endpoints.
• GRAPH_TYPE: Specify the type of graph to display. Default is pie, other good option is donut. Other choices can be found here: _C3JS_documentation`
• GRAPH_FACTS: A list of fact names to tell PuppetBoard to generate a pie-chart on the fact page. With some fact values being unique per node, like ipaddress, uuid, and serial number, as well as structured facts it was no longer feasible to generate a graph for everything.
• INVENTORY_FACTS: A list of tuples that serve as the column header and the fact name to search for to create the inventory page. If a fact is not found for a node then undef is printed.
• ENABLE_CATALOG: If set to True allows the user to view a node's latest catalog. This includes all managed resources, their file-system locations and their relationships, if available. Defaults to False.
• REFRESH_RATE: Defaults to 30 the number of seconds to wait until the index page is automatically refreshed.
• DEFAULT_ENVIRONMENT: Defaults to 'production', as the name suggests, load all information filtered by this environment value.
• REPORTS_COUNT: Defaults to 10 the limit of the number of reports to load on the node or any reports page.
• OFFLINE_MODE: If set to True load static assets (jquery, semantic-ui, etc) from the local web server instead of a CDN. Defaults to False.
• DAILY_REPORTS_CHART_ENABLED: Enable the use of daily chart graphs when looking at dashboard and node view.
• DAILY_REPORTS_CHART_DAYS: Number of days to show history for on the daily report graphs.
• DISPLAYED_METRICS: Metrics to show when displaying node summary. Example: 'resources.total', 'events.noop'.
• TABLE_COUNT_SELECTOR: Configure the dropdown to limit number of hosts to show per page.
• LITTLE_TABLE_COUNT: Default number of reports to show when when looking at a node.
• NORMAL_TABLE_COUNT: Default number of nodes to show when displaying reports and catalog nodes.
• LOCALISE_TIMESTAMP: Normalize time based on localserver time.
• WITH_EVENT_NUMBERS: If set to True then Overview and Nodes list shows exact number of changed resources in the last report. Otherwise shows only 'some' string if there are resources with given status. Setting this to False gives performance benefits, especially in big Puppet environments (more than few hundreds of nodes). Defaults to True.
• DEV_LISTEN_HOST: For use with dev.py for development. Default is localhost
• DEV_LISTEN_PORT: For use with dev.py for development. Default is 5000

Getting Help

For questions or bug reports you can file an issue.

(Previously mentioned here methods of contacting the app maintainers are not used as of now anymore, sorry.)

Contributing

Development

Puppetboard relies on the pypuppetdb library to fetch data from PuppetDB and is built with the help of the Flask microframework.

If you wish to hack on Puppetboard you should fork/clone the Github repository and then install the requirements through:

$ pip install -r requirements-test.txt

You're advised to do this inside a virtualenv specifically created to work on Puppetboard as to not pollute your global Python installation.

You can run the app it in development mode by simply executing:

$ python dev.py

Use PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS to change the different settings or patch default_settings.py directly. Take care not to include your local changes on that file when submitting patches for Puppetboard. Place a settings.py file inside the base directory of the git repository that will be used, if the environment variable is not set.

We welcome contributions to this project. However, there are a few ground rules contributors should be aware of.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache v2.0 License. As such, your contributions, once accepted, are automatically covered by this license.

Commit messages

Write decent commit messages. Don't use swear words and refrain from uninformative commit messages as 'fixed typo'.

The preferred format of a commit message:

docs/quickstart: Fixed a typo in the Nodes section.

If needed, elaborate further on this commit. Feel free to write a
complete blog post here if that helps us understand what this is
all about.

Fixes #4 and resolves #2.

If you'd like a more elaborate guide on how to write and format your commit messages have a look at this post by Tim Pope.

More Screenshots

Up to date ones:

Older ones, may be a bit outdated: