I have recently found myself writing a lot of HTTP Authentication password files. After looking around at the various Puppet solutions for managing these files, I wasn’t overly happy with any of them. So I sat down to try to puzzle out how hard it’d be to manage HTTP password files using a custom type. After exploring the htpasswd and htdigest commands it was clear that it wasn’t going to provide a solution: you can add and delete users from files but you can’t query a HTTP password file to determine if a user already exists in the file.

In a previous post I talked about using Cucumber and Cucumber- Nagios to do what I crudely called “Behaviour Driven Infrastructure”. In that post I gave you a very brief introduction to Cucumber’s syntax. This post explores another piece of syntax called outlining that allows you to shortcut some of your testing scenarios. In the tests we demonstrated you could potentially end up with some quite repetitive scenarios, for example:

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve accepted a role at PuppetLabs (formally Reductive Labs) as their Director of Operations (Director of DevOps even? :) ). I’ve had a long association with Puppet and the team at Puppet Labs and consider them some of the smartest people around. As a result when I got talking to Luke about coming to work for them I was both excited and terrified. Excited because I see it as a incredible opportunity to shape a tool, Puppet, that I am deeply committed to (or should be committed?

I’m pleased to be speaking at the inaugural DevOpsDownUnder conference. I’m going to be discussing: What The Fuck Is DevOps? In a period of a month or so about ten or so people all came out and declared what they thought “DevOps” was - including me. This was followed by a number of others coming out of the woodwork and stating “No, it’s not - that’s insertotherideaorproductorvendorbuzzword here” or “Der, of course it is and by-the-way we’ve been doing that since monkey’s climbed down from the trees”.

I’ve created RPM and DEB packages for the Puppet Dashboard 1.0.0rc1. These are available via APT and Yum repositories hosted by Puppet Labs. Here are some simple instructions for grabbing the packages. These are “first release” packages and I am by no means a packaging expert with either DEBs or RPMs so any feedback or comments are welcomed. I’ll continue to update the packages as updates to the Dashboard are released.