Puppet - Agent Setup

Puppet agent is a software apppcation, provided by Puppet labs, which runs on any node in Puppet cluster. If one wants to manage any server using the Puppet master, the Puppet agent software needs to be installed on that particular server. In general, the Puppet agent will be installed on all the machines excluding the Puppet master machine on any given infrastructure. Puppet agent software has the capabipty to run on most of the Linux, UNIX, and Windows machines. In the following examples, we are using CentOS machine installation Puppet agent software on it.

Step 1 − Enable the official Puppet labs collection repository with the following command.

$ sudo rpm -ivh https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-pc1-el7.noarch.rpm

Step 2 − Install the Puppet agent package.

$ sudo yum -y install puppet-agent

Step 3 − Once the Puppet agent is installed, enable it with the following command.

$ sudo /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet resource service puppet ensure=running enable = true

One key feature of the Puppet agent is, for the first time when the Puppet agent starts running, it generates a SSL certificate and sends it to the Puppet master which is going to manage it for signing and approval. Once the Puppet master approves the agent’s certificate signature request, it will be able to communicate and manage the agent node.

Note − One needs to repeat the above steps on all the nodes which needs to be configured and managed any a given Puppet master.