Extending Puppet

Abstract

Among the most powerful features of both Puppet and Facter are their flexibility and extensibility. In addition to the existing resource types and facts, you can quickly and easily add custom types and facts specific to your environment or to meet a particular need. In this chapter, we’re going to examine how to add your own custom facts to Facter, have Puppet automatically distribute those facts, and then see how to make use of them. I’m also going to demonstrate how to create a simple resource type (and associated provider) for Puppet and how to integrate that new resource type into your Puppet installation. This chapter, however, is just an introduction to extending Puppet. If you want to learn more, there is extensive documentation available on the Puppet Wiki and on the Puppet Developer mailing list.