Puppet Sandbox is a multi-VM Vagrant-based Puppet development environment used for creating and testing new modules outside of your production environment. It is prefered over the upstream Learning Puppet VM as it gives you more flexibility and allows you to use your own local editing environment and tools.

Puppet Sandbox will set up three separate virtual machines:

• puppet.example.com - the Puppet master server
• client1.example.com - the first Puppet client machine
• client2.example.com - the second Puppet client machine

These VMs can be used in conjunction to segregate and test your modules based on node roles, Puppet environments, etc. You can even test modules on different Linux distributions or release versions to better match your production infrastructure.

Check out the Puppet Sandbox Demonstration screencast for a brief overview of the project.

To use Puppet Sandbox, you must have the following items installed and working:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant 1.1+

Puppet Sandbox has been designed for and tested with Vagrant base boxes running:

• CentOS 6.3
• CentOS 5.8
• Ubuntu 12.04 - Precise Pangolin
• Ubuntu 10.04 - Lucid Lynx

...although it may work just fine with other distributions/versions.

Make sure you have a compatible Vagrant base box (if you don't have one already, it will download a 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 box for you), and then you should be good to clone this repo and go:

$ vagrant box list
precise64
$ git clone git://github.com/elasticdog/puppet-sandbox.git
$ cd puppet-sandbox/

If you want a CentOS base box to work from, I highly recommend the boxes published by Jan Vansteenkiste: http://packages.vstone.eu/vagrant-boxes/

To bring up the Puppet Sandbox environment, issue the following command:

$ vagrant up

The following tasks will be handled automatically:

1. The Puppet server daemon will be installed and enabled on the master machine.
2. The Puppet client agent will be installed and enabled on all three machines.
3. A host-only network will be set up with all machines knowing how to communicate with each other.
4. All client certificate requests will be automatically signed by the master server.
5. The master server will utilize the nodes.pp file and modules/ directory that exist outside of the VMs (in your puppet-sandbox Git working directory) by utilizing VirtualBox's shared folder feature.

All of this is handled using Vagrant's provisioning capabilities and is controlled by the manifests under the provision/ directory. In theory, you should never have to touch any of that code directly unless you're working to improve Puppet Sandbox.

If you wish to change the domain name of the VMs (it defaults to example.com), edit the "domain" variable at the top of Vagrantfile and reload the machines:

$ vim Vagrantfile
$ vagrant reload

To start developing a new Puppet module, just create the standard module structure under modules/ in your puppet-sandbox Git working directory (an example "helloworld" module should exist there already). This directory is automatically in the Puppet master server's modulepath, and any changes will be picked up immediately.

$ mkdir -p modules/users/manifests
$ vim modules/users/manifests/init.pp

To have your module actually applied to one or more of the nodes, edit the nodes.pp file and include your classes...that's it!

To log on to the virtual machines and see the result of your applied Puppet modules, just use standard Vagrant Multi-VM Environment commands, and provide the proper VM name (master, client1, or client2):

$ vagrant ssh client1

If you don't want to wait for the standard 30-minutes between Puppet runs by the agent daemon, you can easily force a manual run:

[vagrant@client1 ~]$ sudo puppet agent --test

Puppet Sandbox is provided under the terms of The MIT License.

Copyright © 2012, Aaron Bull Schaefer.