Even if you manage just a handful or two servers, Puppet can already help you to save loads of time and ensures all your systems run in the desired state.

Somehow, I could not find very many or good manuals on how to set up your own (basic) Puppet server on Debian, so I decided to write my own.

The installation in Debian (10 or later) is – as always in Debian – straight forward. Just run an

apt install puppet puppet-master vim-puppet

That last package is not really needed but comes in really handy when editing your Puppet manifests in vim and you want syntax highlighting. While this would be more needed on a git client (which will be discussed here in future) it also is nice to have on the Puppet master.

As for the main configuration file /etc/puppet/puppet.conf I leave the Debian standard for what it is.

Your manifests should be in /etc/puppet/code/ and the basic structure looks like this:

/etc/puppet/code
            ├── environments
            │   └── production
            │       └── manifests
            └── modules
                ├── module1
                │   ├── examples
                │   ├── files
                │   └── manifests
                ├── module2
                │   ├── examples
                │   ├── manifests
                │   └── files
                └── moduleX
                    ├── examples
                    ├── files
                    └── manifests