Quick Start to Developing on Puppet

Before diving into the code, you should first take the time to make sure you have an environment where you can run puppet as a developer. In a nutshell you need: the puppet codebase, ruby versions, and dependencies. Once you've got all of that in place you can make sure that you have a working development system by running the puppet spec tests.

The Puppet Codebase

In order to contribute to puppet you'll need to have a GitHub account. Once you have your account, fork the puppetlabs/puppet repo, and clone it onto your local machine. The GitHub docs have a good explanation of how to do all of this.

Ruby versions

Puppet needs to work across a variety of ruby versions. Popular ways of making sure you have access to the various versions of ruby are to use either rbenv or rvm. You can read up on the linked sites for how to get them installed on your system.

Dependencies

Make sure you have bundler installed. This should be as simple as:

$ gem install bundler

Now you can get all of the dependencies using:

$ bundle install --path .bundle

Once this is done, you can interact with puppet through bundler using bundle exec <command> which will ensure that <command> is executed in the context of puppet's dependencies.

For example to run the specs:

$ bundle exec rake spec

To run puppet itself (for a resource lookup say):

$ bundle exec puppet resource host localhost

To apply a test manifest:

$ bundle exec puppet apply -e 'notify { "hello world": }'

Running Spec Tests

Puppet projects use a common convention of using Rake to run unit tests. The tests can be run with the following rake task:

$ bundle exec rake spec

To run a single file's worth of tests (much faster!), give the filename:

$ bundle exec rake spec TEST=spec/unit/file_system_spec.rb

To run a single test or group of tests, give the filename and line number:

$ bundle exec rake spec TEST=spec/unit/file_system_spec.rb:42

To run all tests in parallel, process count is the number of processes to use when running the tests:

$ bundle exec rake parallel:spec[process_count]

When tests fail, it is often useful to capture Puppet's log of a test run. The test harness pays attention to two environment variables that can be used to send logs to a file, and to adjust the log level:

PUPPET_TEST_LOG: when set, must be an absolute path to a file. Puppet's log messages will be sent to that file. Note that the log file will contain lots of spurious warnings Unable to set ownership of log file
- you can safely ignore them.
PUPPET_TEST_LOG_LEVEL: change the log level to adjust how much detail is captured. It defaults to notice; useful values include info and debug.

Running Acceptance Tests

For details on how to run puppet acceptance tests, please see the acceptance readme

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