Puppetboard is a web interface to PuppetDB aiming to replace the reporting functionality of Puppet Dashboard.

Puppetboard relies on the pypuppetdb library to fetch data from PuppetDB and is built with the help of the Flask microframework.

Because this project is powered by Flask we are restricted to:

• Python 2.6
• Python 2.7

Puppetboard is very, very young but it works fairly well.

That being said a lot of the code is very exeprimental, just trying to figure out what works and what not, what we need to do different and what features we need on the PuppetDB side of things.

As such you should be at least comfortable handling a few errors this might throw at you.

Puppetboard is now packaged and available on PyPi.

To install it simply issue the following command:

$ pip install puppetboard

This will install Puppetboard and take care of the dependencies. If you do this Puppetboard will be installed in the so called site-packages or dist-packages of your Python distribution.

The complete path on Debian systems would be: /usr/local/lib/python2.X/lib/dist-packages/puppetboard.

You will need this path in order to configure your HTTPD and WSGI-capable application server.

Native packages for your operating system will be provided in the near future.

If you wish to hack on Puppetboard you should fork/clone the Github repository and then install the requirements through:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

You're advised to do this inside a virtualenv specifically created to work on Puppetboard as to not pollute your global Python installation.

The following instructions will help you configure Puppetboard and your HTTPD.

Puppetboard is built completely around PuppetDB which means your environment needs to be configured to do that.

In order to get the reports to show up in Puppetboard you need to configure your environment to store those reports in PuppetDB. Have a look at the documentation about this, specifically the Enabling report storage section.

Puppetboard will look for a file pointed at by the PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS environment variable. The file has to be identical to default_settings.py but should only override the settings you need changed.

You can grab a copy of default_settings.py from the path where pip installed Puppetboard to or by looking in the source checkout.

If you run PuppetDB and Puppetboard on the same machine the default settings provided will be enough to get you started and you won't need a custom settings file.

Assuming your webserver and PuppetDB machine are not identical you will at least have to change the following settings:

• PUPPETDB_HOST
• PUPPETDB_PORT

By default PuppetDB requires SSL to be used when a non-local client wants to connect. Therefor you'll also have to supply the following settings:

• PUPPETDB_KEY = /path/to/private/keyfile.pem
• PUPPETDB_CERT = /path/to/public/keyfile.crt

For information about how to generate the correct keys please refer to the pypuppetdb documentation.

Other settings that might be interesting:

• PUPPETDB_TIMEOUT: Defaults to 20 seconds but you might need to increase this value. It depends on how big the results are when querying PuppetDB. This behaviour will change in a future release when pagination will be introduced.
• UNRESPONSIVE_HOURS: The amount of hours since the last check-in after which a node is considered unresponsive.
• LOGLEVEL: A string representing the loglevel. It defaults to 'info' but can be changed to 'warning' or 'critical' for less verbose logging or 'debug' for more information.
• ENABLE_QUERY: Defaults to True causing a Query tab to show up in the web interface allowing users to write and execute arbitrary queries against a set of endpoints in PuppetDB. Change this to False to disable this.

You can run it in development mode by simply executing:

$ python dev.py

Use PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS to change the different settings or patch default_settings.py directly. Take care not to include your local changes on that file when submitting patches for Puppetboard. Place a settings.py file inside the base directory of the git repository that will be used, if the environment variable is not set.

To run Puppetboard in production we provide instructions for the following scenarios:

• Apache + mod_wsgi
• Apache + mod_passenger
• uwsgi + nginx

If you deploy Puppetboard through a different setup we'd welcome a pull request that adds the instructions to this section.

First we need to create the necessary directories:

$ mkdir -p /var/www/puppetboard
$ chown www-data:www-data /var/www/puppetboard

Copy Puppetboard's default_settings.py to the newly created puppetboard directory and name the file settings.py. This file will be available at the path Puppetboard was installed, for example: /usr/local/lib/python2.X/lib/dist-packages/puppetboard/default_settings.py.

Change the settings that need changing to match your environment and delete or comment with a # the rest of the entries.

If you don't need to change any settings you can skip the creation of the settings.py file entirely.

Now create a wsgi.py with the following content in the newly created puppetboard directory:

from __future__ import absolute_import
import os

# Needed if a settings.py file exists
os.environ['PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS'] = '/var/www/puppetboard/settings.py'
from puppetboard.app import app as application

Make sure this file is owned by the user and group the webserver runs as.

The last thing we need to do is configure Apache:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName puppetboard.example.tld
    WSGIDaemonProcess puppetboard user=www-data group=www-data threads=5
    WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/puppetboard/wsgi.py
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/puppetboard.error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/puppetboard.access.log combined

    Alias /static /usr/local/lib/python2.X/dist-packages/puppetboard/static

    <Directory /usr/local/lib/python2.X/dist-packages/puppetboard>
        WSGIProcessGroup puppetboard
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Note the directory path, it's the path to where pip installed Puppetboard. We also alias the /static path so that Apache will serve the static files like the included CSS and Javascript.

It is possible to run Python applications through Passenger. Passenger has supported this since version 3 but it's considered experimental. Since the release of Passenger 4 it's a 'core' feature of the product.

Performance wise it also leaves something to be desired compared to the mod_wsgi powered solution. Application start up is noticeably slower and loading pages takes a fraction longer.

First we need to create the necessary directories:

$ mkdir -p /var/www/puppetboard/{tmp,public}
$ chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/puppetboard

Copy Puppetboard's default_settings.py to the newly created puppetboard directory and name the file settings.py. This file will be available at the path Puppetboard was installed, for example: /usr/local/lib/python2.X/lib/dist-packages/puppetboard/default_settings.py.

Change the settings that need changing to match your environment and delete or comment with a # the rest of the entries.

If you don't need to change any settings you can skip the creation of the settings.py file entirely.

Now create a passenger_wsgi.py with the following content in the newly created puppetboard directory:

from __future__ import absolute_import
import os
import logging

logging.basicConfig(filename=/path/to/file/for/logging, level=logging.INFO)

# Needed if a settings.py file exists
os.environ['PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS'] = '/var/www/puppetboard/settings.py'

try:
    from puppetboard.app import app as application
except Exception, inst:
    logging.exception("Error: %s", str(type(inst)))

Unfortunately due to the way Passenger works we also need to configure logging inside passenger_wsgi.py else application start up issues won't be logged.

This means that even though LOGLEVEL might be set in your settings.py this setting will take precedence over it.

Now the only thing left to do is configure Apache:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName puppetboard.example.tld
    DocumentRoot /var/www/puppetboard/public
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/puppetboard.error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/puppetboard.access.log combined

    RackAutoDetect On
    Alias /static /usr/local/lib/python2.X/dist-packages/puppetboard/static
</VirtualHost>

Note the /static alias path, it's the path to where pip installed Puppetboard. This is needed so that Apache will serve the static files like the included CSS and Javascript.

A common Python deployment scenario is to use the uwsgi application server (which can also serve rails/rack, PHP, Perl and other applications) and proxy to it through something like nginx or perhaps even HAProxy.

uwsgi has a feature that every instance can run as its own user. In this example we'll use the www-data user but you can create a separate user solely for running Puppetboard and use that instead.

First we need to create the necessary directories:

$ mkdir -p /var/www/puppetboard
$ chown www-data:www-data /var/www/puppetboard

Copy Puppetboard's default_settings.py to the newly created puppetboard directory and name the file settings.py. This file will be available at the path Puppetboard was installed, for example: /usr/local/lib/python2.X/lib/dist-packages/puppetboard/default_settings.py.

Change the settings that need changing to match your environment and delete or comment with a # the rest of the entries.

If you don't need to change any settings you can skip the creation of the settings.py file entirely.

Now create a wsgi.py with the following content in the newly created puppetboard directory:

from __future__ import absolute_import
import os

# Needed if a settings.py file exists
os.environ['PUPPETBOARD_SETTINGS'] = '/var/www/puppetboard/settings.py'
from puppetboard.app import app as application

Make sure this file is owned by the user and group the uwsgi instance will run as.

Now we need to start uwsgi:

$ uwsgi --http :9090 --wsgi-file /var/www/puppetboard/wsgi.py

Feel free to change the port to something other than 9090.

The last thing we need to do is configure nginx to proxy the requests:

upstream puppetboard {
    server 127.0.0.1:9090;
}

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name puppetboard.example.tld;
    charset     utf-8;

    location /static {
        alias /usr/local/lib/python2.X/dist-packages/puppetboard/static;
    }

    location / {
        uwsgi_pass puppetboard;
        include    /path/to/uwsgi_params/probably/etc/nginx/uwsgi_params;
    }
}

If all went well you should now be able to access to Puppetboard. Note the /static location block to make nginx serve static files like the included CSS and Javascript.

Because nginx natively supports the uwsgi protocol we use uwsgi_pass instead of the traditional proxy_pass.

If you wish to make users authenticate before getting access to Puppetboard you can use one of the following configuration snippets.

Inside the VirtualHost:

<Location "/">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Puppetboard"
    Require valid-user
    AuthBasicProvider file
    AuthUserFile /path/to/a/file.htpasswd
</Location>

Inside the location / {} block that has the uwsgi_pass directive:

auth_basic "Puppetboard";
auth_basic_user_file /path/to/a/file.htpasswd;

This project is still very new so it's not inconceivable you'll run into issues.

For bug reports you can file an issue. If you need help with something feel free to hit up @daenney by e-mail or find him on IRC. He can usually be found on IRCnet and Freenode and idles in #puppet.

There's now also the #puppetboard channel on Freenode where we hang out and answer questions related to pypuppetdb and Puppetboard.

Some people have already started building things with and around Puppetboard.

Hunter Haugen has provided a Vagrant setup:

• https://github.com/hunner/puppetboard-vagrant

Spencer Krum created a Puppet module to install Puppetboard with:

• https://github.com/nibalizer/puppet-module-puppetboard

You can install it with:

puppet module install nibalizer-puppetboard

An OpenBSD port is being maintained by Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse and can be viewed here.

We welcome contributions to this project. However, there are a few ground rules contributors should be aware of.

This project is licensed under the Apache v2.0 License. As such, your contributions, once accepted, are automatically covered by this license.

Write decent commit messages. Don't use swear words and refrain from uninformative commit messages as 'fixed typo'.

The preferred format of a commit message:

docs/quickstart: Fixed a typo in the Nodes section.

If needed, elaborate further on this commit. Feel free to write a
complete blog post here if that helps us understand what this is
all about.

Fixes #4 and resolves #2.

If you'd like a more elaborate guide on how to write and format your commit messages have a look at this post by Tim Pope.