Setting up your development environment

Rule number one of the Puppet Club:

We don't write or test code in our production environment.

There is no simple, one click solution for testing Puppet code. Testing Puppet code requires a collection of tools and methodologies to get the job done.

Here is a list of what you might need in your Puppet testing journey:

• Vagrant [1]
• RVM [2]
• Bundler [3]
• Git [4]
• Gitflow [5]
• Packer [6]
• Puppet Lint [7]
• Rspec [8]
• Rspec Puppet [9]
• Beaker [10]
• Rspec Beaker [11]
• Serverspec [12]

In the next section I will present the first six. I will give you a brief rundown of what they can do and how they tie to our work flow. I will talk about the remaining in following chapters since they are the tools that actually test your Puppet code.

[1] Vagrant: https://www.vagrantup.com/

[2] RVM: https://rvm.io/

[3] Bundler: http://bundler.io/

[4] Git - fast version control: https://git-scm.com/

[5] A successful Git branching model: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

[6] Packer: https://www.packer.io/

[7] Puppet Lint - Check that your Puppet manifest conform to the style guide: http://puppet-lint.com/

[8] Rspec - Behaviour Driven Development for Ruby. Making TDD Productive and Fun.: http://rspec.info/

[9] Rspec-Puppet - RSpec tests for your Puppet manifests: http://rspec-puppet.com/

[10] Puppetlabs Beaker - Puppet Acceptance Testing Harness: https://github.com/puppetlabs/beaker

[11] Puppetlabs Rspec Beaker - Bridge between puppet test harness (beaker) and rspec: https://github.com/puppetlabs/beaker-rspec