Masterless Puppet is a common way of running Puppet where you might have a number of Puppet Agents, but no hosts running under any other roles (master, dashboard, database, default).
A few examples of common situations where running masterless Puppet would be useful are below:
- Testing modules against Windows. Traditionally, a non-Windows master would be required, but is really just needless overhead in this case.
- running Puppet to provision hosts, only running it the once, using
puppet agent, and then providing it to your users
In order to have Beaker support a masterless Puppet setup, you have to do a few things:
- include the
masterless: trueflag in theCONFIGsection of your hosts file - Make sure the roles are correct for the hosts now. You'll want to make sure a host doesn't have a role that it won't be able to fulfill
- Run Beaker just like you normally would
Be default (without the masterless flag), when someone calls for a host of a particular role, using the Beaker::DSL::Roles module's methods (ie. master, dashboard, etc), Beaker checks to verify that a host was given with that role.
If no host was given with this role, then Beaker throws a DSL::Outcomes::FailTest Error, which causes that test case to fail.
Inside Beaker, when you call Beaker::DSL::Roles module's methods with the masterless flag set, Beaker will allow there to be hosts which don't fit defined roles. If a host can't be found for a particular role, that role method will now return nil.
If you'd like to test both masterless and not, you'll have to deal with a role method potentially returning nil.
You can make it so that a test will only run if we're not running masterless with this line:
confine :to, :masterless => false
and vice versa.