Registered for linux.conf.au

So, I just registered for linux.conf.au and when ticking all those check boxes for years past, I worked out that this will be my tenth linux.conf.au! Wow… that’s a few of them.

Over the past 9 I’ve attended I’ve gone to great sessions, met interesting people, discovered interesting projects and made good friends.

I wonder what this one will bring….

Puppet snippet for setting up a machine to build Drizzle

You could use this in a Vagrant setup if you like (I’ve done so for testing).

Step 1) Set the following in your Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.box = "lucid32"
  config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box"
  config.vm.provision :puppet
end

Step 2) Get puppet-apt helper.

I used https://github.com/evolvingweb/puppet-apt and put it in a manifests/ directory like so:

$ mkdir manifests
$ cd manifests
$ git clone git://github.com/evolvingweb/puppet-apt.git

Step 3) Write your puppet manifest:

import "puppet-apt/manifests/init.pp"
import "puppet-apt/manifests/ppa.pp"
class drizzlebuild {
        apt::ppa { "ppa:drizzle-developers/ppa": }
        package { "drizzle-dev":
                  ensure => latest,
        }
}
include drizzlebuild

Step 4) “vagrant  up” and you’re done! Feel free to build Drizzle inside this VM.

I’m sure there may be some more proper way to do it all, but that was a pretty neat first intro to me to Puppet and friends :)

Puppet + Vagrant + jenkins = automated bliss

I’m currently teaching myself how to do Puppet. Why? Well, at Percona we support a bunch of platforms for our software. This means we have to maintain a bunch of Jenkins slaves to build the software on. We want to add new machines and have (up until now) maintained a magic “apt-get install” command line in the Jenkins EC2 configuration. This isn’t an ideal situation and there’s been talk of getting Puppet to do the heavy lifting for a while.

So I sat down to do it.

Step 1: take the “apt-get install” line and convert it into puppet speak.

This was pretty easy. I started off with Vagrant starting a Ubuntu Lucid 32 VM (just like in the Vagrant getting started guide) and enabled the provision using puppet bit.

Step 2: find out you need to run “apt-get update”

Since the base VM I’m using was made there had been updates, so I needed to make any package installation depend on running “apt-get update” to ensure I was both installing the latest version and that the repositories would have the files I was looking for.

This was pretty easy (once I knew how):

exec {"apt-update":
       command => "/usr/bin/apt-get update",
}
Exec["apt-update"] -> Package <| |>

This simply does two things: specify to run “apt-get update” and then specify that any package install depends on having run “apt-update” first.

I’ve also needed things such as:

case $operatingsystem {
     debian, ubuntu: { $libaiodev = "libaio-dev" }
     centos, redhat: { $libaiodev = "aio-devel" }
     default: { fail("Unrecognised OS for libaio-dev") }
}
package { "libaio-dev":
          name => $libaiodev,
          ensure => latest,
}

The idea being that when I go and test all this stuff running on CentOS, it should mostly “just work” there too.

The next step? Setting up and running the Jenkins slave.