adam buxton abuxton

Puppet Node Purging via API

When you're decomissioning a machine that has been managed by Puppet you may want to programatically clean up the node. There are two parts to this:

revoking and deleting the certificate of the node in Puppet's CA
deactivating the node in PuppetDB

The following should work for Puppet 4.x and Puppet DB 4.x (including Puppet Enterprise 2016.4.x, 2017.1.x, 2017.2.x).

I've used certificate based auth, and the examples are being run from the puppet master so make use of existing certificates for authentication. When run remotely the cacert, certificate and corresponding private key for authentication will need to be present.

Docker-based Web Application Setup (example)

This is an example of hosting standalone web front-end (web) and data API (api) applications under the same domain via Nginx (acting as a reverse proxy) and Docker, where HTTP requests starting with example.com/graphql and example.com/login/* are being redirected to http://api:3000 and everything else under the same domain is going to be passed to http://web:3000.

Folder Structure

.
├── /nginx.sites/               # Server configuration for each of web apps
├── /nginx.snippets/            # Nginx code snippets

Create Root CA (Done once)

Last update: Nov 2025.

Create Root Key

Attention: this is the key used to sign the certificate requests, anyone holding this can sign certificates on your behalf. So keep it in a safe place!

openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp384r1 | openssl ec -aes256 -out rootCA.key

An Ansible summary

Jon Warbrick, July 2014, V3.2 (for Ansible 1.7)

Configuration file

intro_configuration.html

First one found from of

using Ansible command line:

ansible-playbook --connection=local 127.0.0.1 playbook.yml

using inventory:

127.0.0.1 ansible_connection=local

Comprehensions in Python the Jedi way

by Bjørn Friese

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit.

-- The Zen of Python

I frequently deal with collections of things in the programs I write. Collections of droids, jedis, planets, lightsabers, starfighters, etc. When programming in Python, these collections of things are usually represented as lists, sets and dictionaries. Oftentimes, what I want to do with collections is to transform them in various ways. Comprehensions is a powerful syntax for doing just that. I use them extensively, and it's one of the things that keep me coming back to Python. Let me show you a few examples of the incredible usefulness of comprehensions.

This uses terraform's template_file resource to generate a yaml properties file for serverspec to use.

create the Rakefile in your terraform project root
create a spec directory and put spec_helper.rb in it
create the templates/properties.tmpl.yml file
create the serverspec.tf
terraform apply

tests

Tests will be matched based on roles defined for a given node.

	Puppet::Parser::Functions.newfunction(:local_scope,
	:type => :rvalue,
	:doc => <<-'EOS'
	Generates the local scope as a hash. This allows you to use epp functions more
	or less like erb templates by passing local scope as the parameters argument.
	e.g., `content => epp('mymodname/template.epp', local_scope() )`
	EOS
	) do \|args\|
	scope = self.to_hash
	scope.reject! { \|key,val\| scope['facts'].include? key }

	vault.barrier.*
	name="vault_barrier"
	method="$1"

	vault.consul.*
	name="vault_consul"
	method="$1"

	vault.route..
	name="vault_route"

	node_group { 'PE Master':
	ensure => present,
	classes => {
	'pe_repo' => {},
	'pe_repo::platform::el_7_x86_64' => {},
	'puppet_enterprise::profile::master' =>
	{
	'code_manager_auto_configure' => true,
	'file_sync_enabled' => true,
	'r10k_private_key' => $code_manager_private_key_path,