Omnibus Puppet package project

This is an Omnibus project that will build a "monolithic" OS package for Puppet. It installs a source-built Ruby in /opt/puppet-omnibus, then installs all the gems required for Puppet to work into this Ruby. This means it leaves the system-supplied Ruby completely untouched, along with any other Rubies you might happen to have installed.

Why create a monolithic Puppet package?

The goal was to create a Puppet package that could be dropped onto a system at the end of the OS install and immediately begin to manage the system in its entirety, which includes installing and managing the Ruby versions on the machine. Keeping Puppet separate from Rubies used to run applications means this is possible (and it also means you can't break your config management agent by mucking around with Ruby).

What are Omnibus packages?

Omnibus is an OS packaging system built in Ruby, written by the Opscode folks. It was created to build monolithic packages for Chef (which requires Ruby as well). Rather than re-inventing the packaging wheel, it makes use of Jordan Sissel's fpm to build the final package.

The first version of this project used Opscode's tool, but they don't seem to take pull requests, so I enhanced bernd's superb fpm-cookery to create Omnibus packages, and switched this project to use it.

Runtime OS package dependencies

Obviously some components of Ruby/Puppet/Facter have library dependencies. Opscode take the approach of building any binary component from source and having it inside the package. I think this is wasteful if you only have a few OS dependencies - instead, the final package this project builds depends on the OS packages, so apt/yum will automatically pull them in when you install the package.

The exception is libyaml, which now gets built into the Omnibus; this is to help support RHEL/Centos etc without needing EPEL.

Included gems

The following gems are built into the Ruby that Puppet will run from:

• facter
• puppet
• hiera
• json-pure
• puppet
• ruby-augeas
• ruby-shadow
• aws-sdk
• fog

I build in aws-sdk and fog because some of my custom Puppet types make use of AWS APIs. Note that if you need any gems for your custom types, you will have to build them into the Omnibus package (or use the gem command at /opt/puppet-omnibus/embedded/bin/gem to install another gem into the omnibus Ruby - but that's not very CM-friendly!)

How do I build the package?

First you need to clone the repo and do a bundle install to get fpm-cookery.

$ git clone https://github.com/andytinycat/puppet-omnibus
$ bundle install

Now use fpm-cookery to build the package:

$ bundle exec fpm-cook recipes/puppet-omnibus.rb

The final package will be at:

recipes/puppet-omnibus/pkg

You might want to update the maintainer, revision and vendor in puppet-omnibus.rb.

Testing

This is tested fairly extensively in production with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ("precise"). beddari reports it working on RHEL derivatives (Centos, Fedora, et. al.)

Credits

Credit for the Omnibus idea goes to the Opscode and Sensu folks. Credit for coming up with the idea of packaging Puppet like Chef belongs to my colleague lloydpick. Thanks to bernd for the awesome fpm-cookery and for taking my PRs. Thanks to beddari for his PRs to support RHEL derivatives.