Managing an Apache server with Puppet

Puppet is a configuration manager embracing the infrastructure-as-code movement. It allows you to describe the desired configuration of your system. One of the most common tasks for Puppet is to configure an Apache frontend.

This blog post explains how you can use Puppet to configure an Apache server as frontend using the mod_proxy, without having to write a single Apache directive.

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Provisioning Maven artifacts with Puppet

Our last blog post introduced how Puppet can be used to achieve Infrastructure-As-Code, and how to deploy Play applications following this practice. However, we didn’t address how the applications are actually copied to the host.

Apache Maven is a widely used build tool adopted by more and more companies to support their build process from compilation to deployment. Deploying, in the  Maven world,  means uploading the artifact to a Maven repository. Such Maven repositories are managed using Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory. However, this sort of deployment does not address the real provisioning of the application, i.e the deployment on the production servers.

This blog post presents a Puppet module to download Maven artifacts from a Nexus repository. This module closes the gap between the development team deploying their artifacts to a Maven repository, and the administration team responsible for installing and configuring the application.

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Deploying Play Framework applications with Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool made to ease the management of your infrastructure by making it more traceable and easier to understand. It allows infrastructure-as-code, a major trend today to deal with the complexity of infrastructure management.

On the other side, Play framework is a promoting a new way to build web applications, making this sort of development more efficient and productive. By avoiding the turn over (compilation-packaging-deployment-navigation) after every change, it makes web development fun again.

This blog post explains how you can deploy your Play applications using Puppet. This allows you to develop web apps in a very productive way and deploy them reliably.
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