1113724 - Can we create a custom puppet config for webqa-ci1.qa.scl3

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Infrastructure & Operations :: Infrastructure: Puppet, task)

Description

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

We now have webqa-ci1.qa.scl3 for running a Jenkins instance, and I unintentionally caused some issues when installing various packages. I've since learned that I should be using yum-wrapper and not yum, though I couldn't find anywhere that this is documented.

We're going to try again, but I was wondering if it's possible to do a lot of what we need using puppet itself.

Basically I need the following installed:
java, jenkins (custom yum repo), git, development (group install), zlib-devel, openssl-devel, python 2.7, pip, virtualenv

I also need to clone a github repository and add a crontab entry for pulling from the repository. Ideally we'd also have the http proxy environment variables defined too.

The final thing this machine needs is a SSH key generated so we can create a deploy key for a private github repository.

Any of the above can be done manually, but thought it worth asking if it's better practice to do via puppet.

Comment 1

[:Atoll]

It's possible to do this above things with puppet; based on the list of changes, implementing it to work correctly would take several cycles of dev/test/revert/repeat on the puppet manifests and a VM with a snapshot.

For infra servers, we do *prefer* that this sort of thing be done by puppet, but even we vary sometimes on whether it's best or not for a single instance of a given server. How many webqa-ci servers will there be - 1? 5? 10?

So the first step towards puppetizing this host would be to get a precise list of the commands that are required to get it set up - yum install, create /etc/environment for the proxy, how precisely to get python 2.7 up and running (sadly, each group does it differently). And once that list exists, it would be far easier to reconstruct the server in case of an outage.

Comment 2

[Dave Hunt [:davehunt] [he/him] ⌚BST]

There's only going to be one webqa-ci server, and I've been careful to document the steps I've taken to set it up so perhaps it's not worth the effort of doing this via puppet. I'll close this for now and we can always reopen in the future.