Wanting a streamlined puppet skeleton for working on just Puppet 4 and beyond, I started using the excellent puppet-module-skeleton repository (https://github.com/garethr/puppet-module-skeleton) as a starting point. Hence me starting out with a huge and hearty thank you to Gareth and all the contributors to this prior. Before starting this, I looked at the new Puppet Development Kit (https://docs.puppet.com/pdk/latest/index.html) from Puppet which I think eventually replace this. However, it is currently just starting up. Perhaps, one day...
Many of the changes in here as well came from standard practices used by the Vox Pupuli community (https://voxpupuli.org/ , https://github.com/voxpupuli/modulesync_config ) and their assorted already published modules.
Another source of inspiration for files to change and add is the Puppet NTP module v.6.2.0 (https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-ntp/)- the gold standard for Puppet's view of module development.
Puppet modules often take on the same file system structure. The built-in puppet-module tool makes starting modules easy, but the built in skeleton module is very simple. This skeleton is very opinionated. It's going to assume you're going to start out with tests (both unit and system), that you care about the puppet style guide, test using Travis, keep track of releases and structure your modules according to strong conventions.
As a feature, puppet module tool will use ~/.puppetlabs/opt/puppet/cache/puppet-module/ as template for its generate command. The files provided here are meant to be better templates for use with the puppet module tool.
A note about development: I currently am using rvm to manage multiple Ruby environments (2.0.0, 2.1.10, 2.3.1, 2.4.1) on macOS 10.12. This may or may not work on your particular operating system or version of Ruby.
As we don't want to have our .git files and this README in our skeleton, we export it like this :
git clone https://github.com/millerjl1701/puppet-skeleton
cd puppet-skeleton
find skeleton -type f | git checkout-index --stdin --force --prefix="$HOME/.puppetlabs/opt/puppet/cache/puppet-module/" --
There is an installation script that Gareth wrote and is still in the repository; however, I don't use it.
Then just generate your new module structure like so:
puppet module generate user-module
Once you have your module then install the development dependencies:
cd user-module
bundle install --path=.vendor --without system_tests
Now you should have a bunch of rake commands to help with your module development similar to the below list. There will likely be many more than these when the bundle command completes:
bundle exec rake -T
rake acceptance # Run acceptance tests
rake build # Build puppet module package
rake clean # Clean a built module package
rake contributors # Populate CONTRIBUTORS file
rake coverage # Generate code coverage information
rake help # Display the list of available rake tasks
rake lint # Check puppet manifests with puppet-lint / Run puppet-lint
rake spec # Run spec tests in a clean fixtures directory
rake spec_clean # Clean up the fixtures directory
rake spec_prep # Create the fixtures directory
rake spec_standalone # Run spec tests on an existing fixtures directory
rake syntax # Syntax check Puppet manifests and templates
rake syntax:manifests # Syntax check Puppet manifests
rake syntax:templates # Syntax check Puppet templates
Of particular interst should be:
rake spec- run unit testsrake lint- checks against the puppet style guiderake syntax- to check your have valid puppet and erb syntaxrake metadata_lint- to check your have a valid metadata.json file
The trick used in the installation above, and a few other bits came from another excellent module skeleton from spiette.