Rump

Rump helps you run Puppet locally against a Git checkout.

Rump encourages a Puppet workflow where you quickly + iteratively develop your Puppet manifests on a single machine, then push your changes up to a repository to deploy to the rest of your infrastructure.

This workflow also complements a Capistrano or MCollective-style deployment, where you remotely instruct Rump to check out a copy of the latest manifests and run them.

Rump also has the ability to freeze Puppet in to the manifests repository, letting you quickly test different versions of Puppet without waiting for packages to appear, and reducing the dependencies on a system to run Puppet down to just Ruby and git.

Installing

$ gem install rump

Using Rump

Make sure you check out the man pages.

Check out your repository of Puppet manifests:

$ rump clone git@github.com:me_at_example_dot_org/puppet.git

Now cd into the directory, and do a Puppet run:

$ sudo rump go

When you make changes, run Puppet through Rump:

$ sudo rump go

You can append options you'd normally pass to the puppet command at the end of rump go:

$ sudo rump go --verbose --debug --noop

There's nothing stopping you from running Rump against different checkouts/branches of manifests. This is especially powerful when developing locally with the following workflow:

rump clone git@github.com:me_at_example_dot_org/puppet.git
rump go
cd puppet && git checkout -b new_feature
Make your changes && rump go --noop to see what will change.
Apply the changes with rump go
Iterate until everything's working
git checkout master && git merge new_feature
git push

Freezing Puppet

Alternatively, if you want to live on the bleeding edge and eschew your distribution's packages, you can run Rump entirely from RubyGems or Git. This gives you a whole bunch of advantages:

You only need Ruby installed on your system to run Puppet
A checkout of your manifests also gives you Puppet
Bind your manifests to a particular version of Puppet
Test your manifests against new versions of Puppet in a separate branch
Manage upgrades of Puppet outside your operating system's release cycle

You can freeze Puppet and it's dependencies very easily:

$ rump freeze

This will freeze Puppet + Facter under vendor/, using Bundler.

When you run rump go, Rump checks whether you have frozen Puppet + Facter, and runs the frozen Puppet if available.

You can manage the versions of Puppet you want frozen using the Gemfile at the root of your project. To use a specific version of Puppet, edit your Gemfile:

source :rubygems

gem "puppet", "2.6.4"

If you want to live on the bleeding edge, you can run Puppet out of git:

source :rubygems

gem "puppet", "2.6.7", :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git", :tag => "2.7.0rc1"
gem "facter", "1.5.8", :git => "git://github.com/puppetlabs/facter.git", :tag => "1.5.9rc5"

Any dependency you bundle will automatically be added to the load path when you run rump go.

Developing + Testing Rump

Check out the repository, and run bundle install to suck down all the required development dependencies.

There's a suite of Cucumber tests to fully exercise Rump in features/:

$ cucumber features/

The scenarios are tagged with @offline and @online, depending on whether the test requires internet connectivity. Run all but @online tests with:

$ cucumber --tags ~@online features/

Quirks

Puppet's fileserver (source => "puppet:///..." on File resources) doesn't behave as expected on Puppet < 2.6. If you are using Puppet < 2.6, all files need to be templates.
Manifests need to be in modules so Puppet can pick them up correctly.

rump