Installing a Puppet master on CentOS 7 with nginx and Unicorn

Puppet master node successful test

I was experimenting with configuration management tools, and wanted to set up a Puppet master node for my virtualized machines.

It is unfortunate that most guides out there today are tailored specifically for Ubuntu, or rely on prepackaged DEBs that do all the work (which, obviously, don’t really help on CentOS/Fedora/RedHat). This guide on DigitalOcean for setting up a Puppet master on Ubuntu 14.04 is pretty solid, but my own preferences are for CentOS and Fedora. Furthermore, I have completely migrated to using nginx in all my servers, though many deployment guides for Puppet still use Apache and Passenger. And the closest I could find in a guide for CentOS 6, nginx, and Unicorn used SysVinit and God… which are unnecessary now that systemd has been adopted.

(If you’re not as picky, just use Foreman Installer. It’ll take care of everything… even on CentOS 7.)

This guide will use:

  • CentOS 7 (at the time of writing, latest release)
    • systemd
  • nginx 1.7.x (mainline, from official nginx repository)
  • Unicorn
  • Puppet open source 3.7.x

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