Puppet Explorer - Never sailed straighter

Overview

Puppet Explorer is a web application for PuppetDB that lets you explore your Puppet data. It is made using AngularJS and runs entirely on the client side, so the only backend that is needed is PuppetDB itself and a web server to share the static resources.

It has the same query language as the popular Puppet module dalen-puppetdbquery. This lets you easily filter for a selection of nodes and show the events or facts for only them. So you can handle hosts as groups without needing to have predefined groups, just make them up as you need and click on the pie charts to drill down further. The JavaScript version of this query parser is available as a separate component so you can use it in your own projects easily, node-puppetdbquery.

All views in the application are made to be able to link directly to them, so it is easy to share information you find with coworkers.

It has support for multiple PuppetDB servers.

Screenshots

The dashboard:

Node search:

Events view and filtering:

Facts view:

Demo

Try it out live with some made up AWS data at demo.puppetexplorer.io

Installation

The recommended way to install it is on the same host as your PuppetDB instance. Then proxy /api to port 8080 of your PuppetDB instance (except the /commands endpoint). This avoids the need for any CORS headers.

It is possible to have it on a separate domain from your PuppetDB though. If you do, make sure you have the correct

Access-Control-Allow-Origin

Access-Control-Expose-Headers: X-Records

You need to copy config.js.example to config.js and modify it for your needs.

To simplify installation you can use the spotify-puppetexplorer Puppet module.

Dependencies

It is using the V4 PuppetDB API from PuppetDB 3.2. Version 1.5.0 works with PuppetDB 2.3.x, but the current version only works with PuppetDB 3.x.

Versions of Puppet prior to 4.0, converted Facter's facts to string, limiting the puppetexplorer's ability to compare them. The stringifyfacts Puppet parameter permits to disable this old behaviour. Please note that Facter 2.3.0 or newer is required for this setting to take effect.

Development and local testing

Install all required dependencies using

npm install

npm install -g grunt-cli

grunt

dist

Use

grunt serve

Optionally you can use the

--puppetdb=url

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 puppetdb.example.com

grunt serve --puppetdb=http://localhost:8080/

With

grunt dev

dist

To build a Debian package use

grunt build_debian

devscripts

debhelper

To build a RPM use

grunt build rpm:snapshot

rpm-build

rpm/RPMS/noarch

See also

• Puppetboard
• Foreman
• Puppet Enterprise