I'd think you know all that information pre deployment

I use containers for dev and testing, but my prod envs are all vms or physical

IMO if you don't have huge horizontal scaling requirements a container buys you little and gets you a lot of added hassle

but YMMV

There are many benefits to containerization, but it seems I can't have the benefits of puppet and containerization at the same time.

I mean, you can have puppet as a configuration management, just not as a long-running process

seems like having puppet lay a configset that can figure out on boot its size and reconfigure nginx slightly (or read some piece of info to determine that data)

gives you what you want

For as much as I have tamed the greater challenges of managing conventional servers with huge special thanks to Puppet’s help, the world is moving towards containerization. And in that world, there does not appear to be a proper configuration management yet.

that's because the design goal for a container is to pass variables in via ENV variables to the container to configure it at run time

and literally never to touch it once it is running

which puppet could configure the image while it's building to be setup to do

I'll be installing an agent on 10 machines, they all follow the naming format of Desktop-####d where #### are numbers. I know that I can set the puppet.conf locally to say which environment to use, but if I want to control that on the server i can do that through site.pp right?

oh dang, nate's replying

No.

site.pp

can not control which environment a Puppet agent runs against. The reason being that an environment is chosen before site.pp ever gets evaluated and compiled into a catalog.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhh

I can use ENC to control though right?

The two ways to pick an environment are: a) Have the agent pick it via

--environment <foo>

when running Puppet or

environment=foo

in puppet.conf b) Use an External Node Classifier (ENC), which will control it on the Puppetserver side.

ok, I just tried ENC and got an error... let me copy it here

ENC and I are apparently not getting along

this is my desktop i'm testing on, this is my puppet_node_classifier file in /usr/local/bin

the settings in my puppet.conf

and the error

Your ENC should output a YAML document that looks like this, and includes an

environment

top-level key if you want the ENC to set an environment: https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/7/nodes_external.html#enc_output_format-section_oxs_qvm_thb

Oh, make sure that

/usr/local/bin/puppet_node_classifier

is executable.

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/puppet_node_classifier

Oh, make sure that

/usr/local/bin/puppet_node_classifier

is executable.

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/puppet_node_classifier

oh shoot, i completely forgot about that