The Setup: Managing an Army of Laptops with Puppet

As a rapidly growing company, GitHub's faced some challenges in how to make sure that everyone can get up and running on projects or continue to work on one of the dozens of existing projects if they've never set it up before. What a nightmare! That's what prompted @jbarnette and @wfarr to develop The Setup. The Setup aims to solve all the problems that used to plague on-boarding GitHubbers onto projects with a lot of automation and a case of the "It Just Works". This presentation talks about the history of The Setup, how it works, and some of the lessons learned along the way.

Transcript

1. Setup the
2. managing an army of laptops ...with puppet
3. hi, my name is will farrington but @wfarr is way shorter
4. i work at a “little-known startup” called github
5. I work on System operations System operations internal apps the setup
6. why
7. once upon a time
8. there was a developer
9. there was a designer
10. oh man, this new macbook pro is sweet! let me run a bunch of stuff by hand so I can get some work done in about 6 to 8 hours, maybe. - some perfectly normal people
11. once upon a time
12. there was a crazy person
13. oh man, this new macbook pro is sweet! let me run a bunch of stuff by hand so I can get some work done in about 6 to 8 hours, maybe. ~ crazy people
15. we made a HUGE mistake
16. yep, it’s pretty bad
17. i thought we cared about testing
18. i thought we cared about repeatability
19. i thought we cared about automation
20. we say those things matter for software and they totally do
21. we do not treat our laptops like they matter
22. wtf is wrong with us
23. wtf is wrong with us i mean srsly guise
24. spock approves this message
25. what
26. a living, breathing software project that tests and automates every little bit of your machine with love
27. @jbarnette
28. about 6000 about 3600 1186 26 lines of Ruby (not incl. tests) lines of Puppet (not incl. tests) commits contributors some numbers
29. chrome, colloquy, dropbox, elasticsearch, emacs, erlang, git, homebrew, hub, iterm2, java, macvim, memcache, mongodb, mysql, nginx, nodejs, nvm, 1passwd, personalization, postgresql, projects, python, qt, rbenv, rdio, redis, ruby, solr, sparrow, textmate, virtualbox, viscosity, wget, xcode, xquartz, zeromq, zsh, and more daily.
30. less than 6 months
31. a githubber’s first day in
33. hours of frustration getting github.com and other projects even working locally
35. a githubber’s first day now
38. drink coffee for 20 minutes
39. Text
41. The Command Line Interface
42. » gh-setup --projects * github
43. github » script/bootstrap github » script/server github » open github.dev # Ready to ship things!
44. » gh-setup octostatus # sets it all up. boom.
45. » gh-setup --stealth # development mode
47. The Puppet DSL
48. The Puppet DSL is pretty easy actually
49. Resources
50. Resources are the basic unit of puppet
51. package { ‘redis-server’: }
52. file { ‘/etc/motd’: content => ‘Hello, world!’ }
53. service { ‘riak’: ensure => running, subscribe => File[‘/etc/riak/vm.args’] } resource type
54. service { ‘riak’: ensure => running, subscribe => File[‘/etc/riak/vm.args’] } resource name
55. service { ‘riak’: ensure => running, subscribe => File[‘/etc/riak/vm.args’] } resource parameters
56. service { ‘riak’: ensure => running, subscribe => File[‘/etc/riak/vm.args’] } metaparameter
57. metaparameters work on every resource
58. metaparameters describe relationships
59. before require subscribe notify this resource must run before this resource must run after this resource runs after and watches this resource runs before and tells
60. resources can have custom types
61. define git::config::local($key, $value) { $safekey = shellquote($key) $safevalue = shellquote($value) $command = "git config --local ${safekey} ${safevalue}" exec { "${command} in ${name}": command => $command, cwd => $name, onlyif => 'test -d .git', unless => "git config --local ${safekey}", require => Package['git'] } }
62. git::config::local { ‘~/github/hubot’: key => ‘heroku.account’, value => ‘work’ }
63. Resources can be grouped with classes
64. class redis { package { ‘redis-server’: } service { ‘redis’: require => Package[‘redis-server’] } }
65. classes can mixin other classes
66. classes can require other classes
67. this matters a whole lot everybody
68. Puppet has its own dsl for a couple reasons
69. 1. puppet was designed for sysadmin-types
70. 2. puppet has semantics about execution that would be confusing and unintuitive in ruby or python or most other languages
71. puppet uses a DAG to apply resources
72. a DAG is a directed, acyclic graph
73. a DAG means relationships matter
74. a DAG also means order of execution does not matter
76. The Setup as a standard library for puppet but designed for personal laptops
77. class github::projects::octostatus { require redis ... }
78. class github::projects::octostatus { ... $dir = "${github::config::srcdir}/octostatus" ... }
79. class github::projects::octostatus { ... git::repo { $dir: source => 'github/octostatus' } ... }
80. class github::projects::octostatus { ... ruby::local { $dir: version => '1.9.3-p194', require => Git::Repo[$dir] } }
81. I like doing things my way
82. class github::people::hubot { include github::projects::all }
83. class github::people::keavy { require gitx require onepassword require sizeup require sparrow require textmate }
84. class github::people::yossef { package { 'Alfred': provider => 'appdmg', source => $alfred_dmg_url; } }
85. class github::people::yossef { setup::tarballed_app { 'Mailplane': source => $mailplane_url; } }
86. class github::people::wfarr { git::config::global { 'alias.st': value => 'status'; 'alias.ci': value => 'commit'; } }
87. class github::people::wfarr { file { '/Users/wfarr/.gitignore': ensure => present, content => '.DS_STORE' } }
88. class github::people::wfarr { package { 'emacs': } git::repo { '/Users/wfarr/.emacs.d': source => 'wfarr/.emacs.d', submodules => true } }
89. class github::people::wfarr { setup::osx_defaults { 'require password always': ensure => present, domain => 'com.apple.screensaver', key => 'askForPassword', value => 1, user => 'wfarr' } }
90. lessons
91. puppeteer supportocat
92. people will do crazy shit to it
93. if it breaks it is your job to fix it
94. if it breaks it is your job to fix it no matter what
95. devs are really good at breaking things
96. people report about 1% of issues they have
97. people report about 1% of issues they have on a really good day
99. rapid iteration on bugs makes people happy
100. avoiding more bugs makes us happy
101. reduce potential for bugs by vendoring
102. EVERYTHING
104. » du -sh /opt/github 3.8G /opt/github
105. there’s
107. =(
108. » env | grep GH_ | wc -l 24
109. » env | grep GH_REDIS_PORT GH_REDIS_PORT=16379
110. » env | grep GH_MYSQL_PORT GH_MYSQL_PORT=13306
112. people just will never remember to update
113. tell people when they should update
115. omg sneak peek time
116. => Installing qt...
119. => Fetching snapshot... => Installing qt...
120. => Fetching snapshot... => Installing ruby-1.9.3...
121. => Fetching snapshot... => Installing node-0.6.8...
122. we don't have the ability to mandate environments
123. we have to provide something dramatically better than just doing it yourself
124. prim donn
125. the setup is not a tool for it administrators
126. the setup is a tool for people to get stuff done
127. the setup is extensible by users
128. the setup is a stable framework for config
129. the setup is about enabling good patterns
130. the setup is not about dictating machine policy
131. how do i get it
132. you don’t =(
133. ... yet
134. we are working hard to open source it
135. Soon!
136. Setup the
137. questions
138. love ops? come work with us puppet, erlang, ruby, shell, c and all the graphs you can shake a stick at
140. thanks