Sick of repeatedly setting up the same things after wiping or upgrading your Raspberry Pi's SD card? Me too! I made this simple puppet repo so I could easily install my Current Cost monitoring software without too many boring, manual steps.
Install Raspbian to your SD card. I'm using wheezy, because that gives me recent versions of ruby and collectd.
Manually install the collectd rubygem. There's a
bug in puppet which means
you can't install two different types of package with the same name.
sudo gem install collectd
It may be possible to work around this by using puppet to manually run gem install, but I haven't gone down that route yet.
Now install puppet:
sudo apt-get install puppet
Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/mattfoster/puppet.git
Edit the nodes.pp, to add your collectd server's secret key (the template
collectd.conf will use the π's hosname as the username). Now ensure you're in
the puppet directory, and run:
sudo puppet apply --modulepath=modules nodes.pp
That's it!
Current Cost is a British energy monitoring company which sells some great kit, including models like the Envi which sport serial ports.
This repo includes my Current Cost monitoring daemon. It's a bit hacky, but seems to work relatively well! For more details, check out my blog.
This is a very small repo, which does very little. Puppet is pretty open-ended, so can be pretty hard to get to grips with.
If you've never used puppet before, this simple repo might give you enough to help you get started. Once you get used to the idea of automating annoying little administrative tasks you'll probably want to use it everywhere.
There's plenty of documentation online, at: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/ and http://puppetcookbook.com/.