Managing environments

Puppet doesn't organize things in modules exclusively. There is a higher-level unit called environment that groups and contains the modules. An environment mainly consists of:

• One or more site manifest files
• A modules directory with your modules inside
• An optional environment.conf configuration file

When the master compiles the manifest for a node, it uses exactly one environment for this task. As described in Chapter 2, Puppet Server and Agents, it always starts in manifests/*.pp, which form the environment's site manifest. Before we take a look at how this works in practice, let's look at an example environment directory:

/opt/puppetlabs/code/environments/
    \- production/
         |- environment.conf
         |- manifests/
         | |- site.pp
         | \- nodes.pp
         \- modules/
             |- my_app/
             \- ntp/

The environment.conf file can customize the environment. Normally, Puppet uses site.pp and the other files in the manifests directory. To...