[[PageOutline]]
= Setting up a puppet development environment =

== Pain test ==
Before you begin, check to see if your CPU supports virtualization:

{{{
egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
}}}

If that commands returns nothing, you are in for a painful ride. Development will be really slow and possibly not worth it.

Hopefully, you will instead see something like:

{{{
0 jamie@chicken:puppet$  egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow up rep_good nopl extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch lbrv
0 jamie@chicken:puppet$
}}}

== Setting up your directory structure ==

Be sure you have at least 2GB of space available on your disk.

Here's a sample directory layout:

 * confdir - put the MFPL git repo here (e.g. `git clone gitosis@git.mayfirst.org/mfpl/puppet confdir`)

 * images - download [/special/roach.qcow.gz roach.qcow.gz] into your images directory. Don't gunzip right away! Instead, make a backup copy (so you don't have to re-download it if you mess it up), then gunzip it. [0]
 {{{
cp roach.qcow.gz roach.qcow.bak.gz; gunzip roach.qcow.gz
 }}}

 * modules - this is where I git checkout puppet modules from other puppet developers before adding them to our repository.

== Launching your virtual image ==

Be sure you have the qemu-kvm package installed.

You can start your virtual image with:

{{{
screen kvm -drive file=images/roach.qcow,if=virtio,id=hda,boot=on -m 512 -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 -nographic
}}}

This should put you into a screen session, allowing you to watch the boot process. You can detach with `ctl-a d` and re-attach with screen -x.

You can login with root (no password).

After logging in, set the root password by typing:

{{{
passwd
}}}

Then, you can exit and detach from the screen session.

== Networking ==

The kvm command sets up very simple networking, with port 2222 on our localhost forwarded to port 22 on roach.

Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file:

{{{
Host roach
Hostname localhost
Port 2222
User root
}}}

Now, you should be able to ssh into your host with:

{{{
ssh root@roach
}}}

== Bootstrapping your puppet configuration ==

You are now ready for your first puppet push.

Begin in your confdir. Add a remote for roach:

{{{
git remote add roach root@roach:/etc/puppet-bare
}}}

Next, push into roach:

{{{
git push roach master
}}}


=== Using a copy-on-write image ===
Alternately, one can create a copy-on-write image to save only the changes made when working with a "base" image. The syntax is:
{{{
qemu-img create -b <path to base image> -f <image format> <path to copy-on-write image>
}}}
For the roach image, this would be:
{{{
qemu-img create -b images/roach.qcow -f qcow2 images/roach-changes.qcow2
}}}
Then one would use "images/roach-changes.qcow2" as the value of the -hda parameter when starting the virtual image.