| Original author(s) | Puppet Labs |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.7.5 / 2011 |
| Preview release | 2.7.6rc2 / 2011 |
| Written in | Ruby |
| Operating system | GNU/Linux, Unix-like, Windows |
| Type | Configuration management |
| License | Apache for >2.7.0 GPL for prior versions. |
| Website | http://www.puppetlabs.com/ |
Puppet is an open source configuration management tool. It is written in Ruby and released under the GPL until version 2.7.0 and the Apache 2.0 license after that.[1]
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Puppet is a tool designed to manage the configuration of Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems declaratively. The user describes system resources and their state, either using Puppet or Ruby DSL (domain-specific language). This information is stored in files called "Puppet manifests". Puppet discovers the system information via a utility called Facter, and compiles the Puppet manifests into a system-specific catalog containing resources and resource dependency, which are applied against the target systems and any actions taken to remediate the system to the desired state will be reported.
Puppet consists of a custom declarative language to describe system configuration, which can be either applied directly on the system, or compiled into a catalog and distributed to the target system via client–server paradigm (using a REST API), and the agent uses system specific providers to enforce the resource specified in the manifests. The resource abstraction layer enables administrators to describe the configuration in high-level terms, such as users, services and packages without the need to specify OS specific commands (such as rpm, yum, apt).
Built to be cross-platform, it works on Linux distributions, including RHEL (and clones such as CentOS and Oracle Linux), Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and SUSE, as well as multiple Unix systems (Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X), and has basic Microsoft Windows support.[2]
It is a model-driven solution that requires no coding knowledge to use.[3]
Puppet is used by Wikimedia Foundation,[4] Dell, Rackspace, Zynga, Twitter, New York Stock Exchange, Disney, Citrix Systems, Oracle, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford University, and Google. [5]