Docs: Using Puppet From Source

Using Puppet From Source

Puppet is implemented in Ruby and uses standard Ruby libraries. You should be able to run Puppet on any Unix-style host with ruby. Windows support is planned for future releases.

Before you Begin

Make sure your host has Ruby version 1.8.2 or later:

$ ruby -v

and, if you want to run the tests, rake:

$ rake -V

While Puppet should work with ruby 1.8.1, there have been many reports of problems with this version.

Make sure you have Git:

$ git --version

Get the Source

Puppet relies on another Puppet Labs library, Facter. Create a working directory and get them both:

$ SETUP_DIR=~/git
$ mkdir -p $SETUP_DIR
$ cd $SETUP_DIR
$ git clone git://github.com/puppetlabs/facter
$ git clone git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet

You will need to periodically run:

$ git pull --rebase origin

From your repositories to periodically update your clone to the latest code.

If you want access to all of the tags in the git repositories, so that you can compare releases, for instance, do the following from within the repository:

$ git fetch --tags

Then you can compare two releases with something like this:

$ git diff 0.25.1 0.25.2

Most of the development on puppet is done in branches based either on features or the major revision lines. Currently the “stable” branch is 0.25.x and development is in the “master” branch. You can change to and track branches by using the following:

git checkout --track -b 0.25.x origin/0.25.x

Tell Ruby How to Find Puppet and Facter

Finally, we need to put the puppet binaries into our path and make the Puppet and Facter libraries available to Ruby:

$ PATH=$PATH:$SETUP_DIR/facter/bin:$SETUP_DIR/puppet/bin
$ RUBYLIB=$SETUP_DIR/facter/lib:$SETUP_DIR/puppet/lib
$ export PATH RUBYLIB

Note: environment variables (depending on your OS) can get stripped when running as sudo. If you experience problems, you may want to simply execute things as root.

Next we must install facter. Facter changes far less often than Puppet and is a very minimal tool/library:

$ cd facter
$ sudo ruby ./install.rb