Chapter 2. Introduction to Puppet

Puppet is an open source configuration management utility produced by Puppet Labs®. You can define system configurations using Puppet's declarative language and store them in files called Puppet manifests, which use the .pp file extension.

Puppet can be run standalone on a system or used in an agent/master configuration. With standalone Puppet, systems run Puppet locally to apply their own configurations. With agent/master Puppet, a central Puppet master server or servers manages multiple systems running the Puppet agent. For either implementation, Puppet manifests are used to bring system configurations to the desired state. A commercial offering, Puppet Enterprise®, is also available from Puppet Labs®.

See the Puppet Labs® documentation ^[1] for more information on Puppet, including instructions for installing agent/master or standalone Puppet ^[2] or installing Puppet Enterprise® ^[3].