Creating a puppet environment

Puppet environments separate development and production configurations. Test changes in a development environment before they reach production nodes.

Naming rules

Environment names contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores:

\A[a-z0-9_]+\Z

Directory structure

Create the folder layout for the new environment. This example uses development:

environments/
└── development/
    ├── manifests/
    └── modules/

Configure puppet.conf

Add the environmentpath to the [main] section of /etc/puppet/puppet.conf:

environmentpath = /etc/puppet/environments

Create the directory structure:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/puppet/environments/development/manifests
sudo mkdir -p /etc/puppet/environments/development/modules

Create environment.conf

Each environment can override settings like modulepath and manifest:

sudo touch /etc/puppet/environments/development/environment.conf

Edit the file:

manifest = $confdir/environments/development/manifests
modulepath = $confdir/environments/development/modules

Verify it works:

sudo puppet config print modulepath --section master --environment development

Install a module into an environment

Check installed modules:

Install a module into the development environment:

puppet module install puppetlabs-stdlib --environment development

Run puppet module list again on the development environment to confirm the install:

The default environment shows a different version of the same module:

A future post covers how nodes select between environments.