I am in Oslo right now speaking at JavaZone about Puppet for Java developers covering some of the basics but then getting into using Vagrant, Puppet and Puppet modules, to manage maven dependencies, postgresql, tomcat, and apache as examples.

The sample code showcases how to effectively use Puppet and modules, with unit testing and testing with Vagrant.

• Vagrant for VM creation and provisioning
• librarian-puppet for automatic module installation
• puppet-rspec for puppet manifest testing

Update: The video is now up. Run a bit short on time and didn’t have as much time as I wanted for the demo but hopefully the sample code is useful to understand the tools involved.

Puppet is an infrastructure-as-code tool that allows easy and automated provisioning of servers, defining the packages, configuration, services,… in code. Enabling DevOps culture, tools like Puppet help drive Agile development all the way to operations and systems administration, and along with continuous integration tools like Jenkins, it is a key piece to accomplish repeatability and continuous delivery, automating the operations side during development, QA or production, and enabling testing of systems configuration.

Traditionally a field for system administrators, Puppet can empower developers, allowing both to collaborate coding the infrastructure needed for their developments, whether it runs in hardware, virtual machines or cloud. Developers and sysadmins can define what JDK version must be installed, application server, version, configuration files, war and jar files,… and easily make changes that propagate across all nodes.

Using Vagrant, a command line automation layer for VirtualBox, they can also spin off virtual machines in their local box, easily from scratch with the same configuration as production servers, do development or testing and tear them down afterwards.

We’ll show how to install and manage Puppet nodes with JDK, multiple application server instances with installed web applications, database, configuration files and all the supporting services. Including getting up and running with Vagrant and VirtualBox for quickstart and Puppet experiments, as well as setting up automated testing of the Puppet code.