Lately I’ve been doing a lot of prototyping with Vagrant, specifically for a couple of distinct activities:-

• building puppet modules using the excellent puppet sandbox project
• and building RPM packages with FPM.

I realized I was spending a bunch of time flipping back and forth between Vagrant environments and I had no quick way to utilize RPMs built with FPM inside my puppet modules.

An idea was born. I forked off the puppet sandbox project and added a Yum repo module repository to the standalone puppet provisioner that vagrant uses when it first brings up a box. It adds a Yum repo on the puppet server called sandbox and adds a repo file to the client boxes pointing to the repo. Now I can simply push an RPM to packages/rpm and run vagrant provision puppet which reruns puppet and rebuilds the yum repo.

Given that I often flip back and forth between Ubuntu and CentOS boxes I also created Vagrantfile.centos63 and Vagrantfile.precise64 so I can swiftly destroy the existing environment and bring up another of a different flavour by simply symlinking Vagrantfile to the appropriate file.

This worked out pretty well for a while until I realized I was still jumping back and forth between vagrant environments and I realized I had another improvement to make. So I then went on to create a definition in the puppet sandbox Vagrantfile file for a FPM server and a new module in the provisioner to install FPM on it. Given that this module simply adds a few packages this module works for both CentOS and Ubuntu.

I also created a couple of sample scripts to download source and build RPMs for both Redis and Elasticsearch which get pushed via the provisioner to /tmp/redis-rpm.sh and /tmp/elasticsearch-rpm.sh

Now ( For CentOS boxes at least ) I can very quickly iterate on puppet modules and create RPM packages on the fly and have them instantly available. The process is very simple and looks a little something like this :

$ git clone https://github.com/paulczar/puppet-sandbox
$ cd puppet-sandbox
$ vagrant up puppet fpm client1
$ vagrant ssh fpm
[vagrant@fpm ~]$ sudo /tmp/redis-rpm.sh
  ... 
  ... A bunch of scrolling text while files are downloaded and rpm is built
  ...
[vagrant@fpm ~]$ exit
$ vagrant provision puppet
$ vagrant ssh client1
[vagrant@client1 ~]$ sudo yum clean all
[vagrant@client1 ~]$ sudo yum -y install redis
[vagrant@client1 ~]$ sudo service redis-server start
[vagrant@client1 ~]$ redis-cli ping
PONG
[vagrant@client1 ~]$

If I’m building a puppet module that needs redis I can now add the following to it’s init.pp ( or more properly create a module for redis and request it from the module I’m building )

  package { 'redis':
    ensure => 'present';
  }

Of course Debian/Ubuntu doesn’t use Yum/RPM for package management. I’d love to accept a pull request from somebody who wants to extend it to also support a local APT repository. I left breadcrumbs in the repository module for some appropriate classes to be spliced in…

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