Puppet + Vagrant VS librarian-puppet

Only recently (call me old-fashioned) I’ve started working with Vagrant to first test my puppet manifests instead of committing everything, push to the puppet master and use test environments on live machines (VM or bare metal, doesn’t matter).
At the same time, I wanted to solve another outstanding problem I had with puppet: external modules. For months/years I’ve suffered from the pain of using git submodules to integrate external modules with the in-house ones, but enough is enough. Searching for a possible solution, I stumbled upon librarian-puppet which seemed to do everything I needed.

Following Librarian’s installation instructions, I moved my modules/ directory to a separate git repository and created a nice and tidy Puppetfile with all my modules (which at the moment were all internal modules). Nice, everything worked as expected, my modules were installed in my local puppet repo with `librarian-puppet install` and I can even add external modules from the Forge with all the dependencies automagically resolved. Happy unicorns are puking colorful rainbows and everything, buuuut…

What happens when I want to edit some internal module in my new, separated modules repository? And what about adding a new role with a couple of profiles that use external modules (defined in the Puppetfile)? BUMMER.

I have to commit everything in my puppet-modules repo and push it somewhere before testing it in Vagrant, because librarian-puppet doesn’t support raw directories. Moreover, I need to edit my Puppetfile with the new development branch!!

That’s not fine at all.

But thankfully both Vagrant and Puppet support more than one modules directory at once, so:

• first, I’ve added back my in-house modules to the original puppet repo, under modules/
•  then, I’ve set up librarian-puppet to use a different path to install the modules it manages:

librarian-puppet config path modules-contrib --global

(in my puppet repo, remeber to gitignore modules-contrib/!)

• relevant fragment of my Vagrantfile:

  config.vm.provision :puppet do |puppet|
  
      puppet.manifests_path    = "#{$puppet_dir}/manifests"
      puppet.manifest_file     = "site.pp"
      puppet.module_path       = [ "#{$puppet_dir}/modules", "#{$puppet_dir}/modules-contrib"]
      puppet.hiera_config_path = "#{$puppet_dir}/hiera.yaml"
  
    end
  end
  

• and finally, if you’re using like me a puppet master, add this line to puppet.conf:

  modulepath = /etc/puppet/modules:/etc/puppet/modules-contrib

Now, it’s just a matter of librarian-puppet install before provisioning Vagrant or just after pushing changes to the Puppet master.