Part 3: Installing puppet-dashboard on CentOS / Puppet 2.6.1

Puppet Dashboard

Puppet dashboard is a fairly new app with loads of future potential and is great for monitoring your puppet estate. This is a quick guide to getting it running on puppet 2.6.1. Be sure you have the correct yum repos and ruby versions installed, see Part 1 and Part 2 for more details.

Install the puppet-dashboard package.

punch# yum --enablerepo=puppetlabs,ruby,epel install puppet-dashboard
[...]
Installing for dependencies:
 mysql                        i386               5.0.77-4.el5_5.3            
 ruby-irb                     i686               1.8.6.111-1                 
 ruby-mysql                   i686               2.7.4-1                     
 ruby-rdoc                    i686               1.8.6.111-1                 
 rubygem-rake                 noarch             0.8.7-2.el5                 
 rubygems                     noarch             1.3.1-1.el5                 
Install       7 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)
 
Total download size: 11 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
[...]

Create a MySQL database for puppet-dashboard

Create a database for puppet-dashboard to use and set up a user with all privileges to use it. This can be done on a seperate host.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE puppetdash;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON puppetdash.* TO puppet@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'punchandjudy';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Configure database.yaml

cd /usr/share/puppet-dashboard
vi config/database.yaml

Add your database parameters to the development section, note that host: can be ommitted if you are using local sockets to connect to MySQL.

development:
  host: professor.craigdunn.org
  database: puppetdash
  username: puppet
  password: punchandjudy
  encoding: utf8
  adapter: mysql

Migrate the database

punch# rake RAILS_ENV=development db:migrate
[...]
(in /usr/share/puppet-dashboard)
==  BasicSchema: migrating ====================================================
-- create_table(:assignments, {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0072s
-- create_table(:nodes, {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0030s
-- create_table(:services, {:force=>true})
   -> 0.0026s
==  BasicSchema: migrated (0.0132s) ===========================================
[...]

Copy reports module to site_ruby

I hate doing this but puppetmasterd explicitly looks for reports in puppet/reports and so far I haven’t found a clean workaround to tell it to look in /usr/share/puppet-dashboard for it. If anyone knows of a way, please email me.

punch# cp /usr/share/puppet-dashboard/ext/puppet/puppet_dashboard.rb /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/reports

Edit your puppet.conf

Include the following in the [master] section, changing punch.craigdunn.org to your puppet server

[master]
reports = puppet_dashboard,store
reportdir = /var/lib/puppet/reports
reporturl = http://punch.craigdunn.org:3000/reports

Restart puppetmaster and start puppet-dashboard

punch# service puppetmaster restart
Stopping puppetmaster:                                     [  OK  ]
Starting puppetmaster:                                      [  OK  ]
punch# service puppet-dashboard start
Starting puppet-dashboard:                                 [  OK  ]

Test web GUI

Go to the following link in your browser (replacing the hostname with your fqdn)


http://punch.craigdunn.org:3000/

Configure the client

Edit puppet.conf

Make sure the following things are set in the [agent] section of puppet.conf on your client node.

judy# vi /etc/puppet/puppet.conf

[agent]
    report = true

Run puppet in noop mode on the client

judy# puppetd --noop --test

Refresh browser

If all has gone well, you should now see your reports in puppet dashboard for your client node.