Puppet Explorer - Never sailed straighter
Overview
Puppet Explorer is a web application for PuppetDB that lets you explore your Puppet data. It is made using AngularJS and runs entirely on the client side, so the only backend that is needed is PuppetDB itself and a web server to share the static resources.
It has the same query language as the popular Puppet module dalen-puppetdbquery. This lets you easily filter for a selection of nodes and show the events or facts for only them. So you can handle hosts as groups without needing to have predefined groups, just make them up as you need and click on the pie charts to drill down further. The JavaScript version of this query parser is available as a separate component so you can use it in your own projects easily, node-puppetdbquery.
All views in the application are made to be able to link directly to them, so it is easy to share information you find with coworkers.
It has support for multiple PuppetDB servers.
Screenshots
The dashboard:
Node search:
Events view and filtering:
Facts view:
Demo
Try it out live with some made up AWS data at demo.puppetexplorer.io
Installation
The recommended way to install it is on the same host as your PuppetDB instance. Then proxy /api to port 8080 of your PuppetDB instance (except the /commands endpoint). This avoids the need for any CORS headers.
It is possible to have it on a separate domain from your PuppetDB though. If you
do, make sure you have the correct Access-Control-Allow-Origin header and a
Access-Control-Expose-Headers: X-Records header.
You need to copy config.js.example to config.js and modify it for your needs.
To simplify installation you can use the spotify-puppetexplorer Puppet module.
Dependencies
It is using the V4 PuppetDB API from PuppetDB 3.2. Version 1.5.0 works with PuppetDB 2.3.x, but the current version only works with PuppetDB 3.x.
Versions of Puppet prior to 4.0, converted Facter's facts to string, limiting the puppetexplorer's ability to compare them. The stringifyfacts Puppet parameter permits to disable this old behaviour. Please note that Facter 2.3.0 or newer is required for this setting to take effect.
Development and local testing
Install all required dependencies using npm install and the grunt cli tool
globally using npm install -g grunt-cli. Then you can build the
application using grunt. The results will be located in the dist directory.
Use grunt serve to start a local web server pointing to the demo site PuppetDB
instance.
Optionally you can use the --puppetdb=url option to specify a URL to proxy
PuppetDB connections to. Another way is to create a SSH tunnel to your PuppetDB
server, ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 puppetdb.example.com and
grunt serve --puppetdb=http://localhost:8080/.
With grunt dev it will start a development server rebuild any source files that
changes and put the results in the dist directory.
To build a Debian package use grunt build_debian, this requires the
devscripts and debhelper packages to be installed.
To build a RPM use grunt build rpm:snapshot, this requires the rpm-build
package to be installed. The resulting RPM will be in rpm/RPMS/noarch.