Puppet
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Definition
In the field of computing, Puppet is an open source management tool for configuration. The Puppet programming language was developed to be made available to the system administrators of the configuration management tool. It is a declarative language that is used for the purpose of system configuration.
A large amount of experience in formal programming areas is not required for the Puppet language. The inspiration for the syntax of this language was taken from the configuration file format of Nagios. The configuration Microsoft Windows systems, and systems similar to UNIX can be managed by Puppet in a declarative manner.
In order to go for configuration management under this tool, the nature, number, and state of system resources is defined by the users. This can either be done through the use of Puppet programming language or through the domain specific language (DSL) of Ruby. The information provided by the users are then stored in files, which are referred to as “Puppet manifests”.
History of Puppet
A significant number of changes were made in the Puppet programming language with the passage of time. Most of these changes were associated with the introduction of newer and finer features, and removal of old and low functioning features. These changes represent the manner in which the language evolved and developed over the period of time.
The first public beta of the language was called Puppet 0.9.x. This was followed by the earlier versions of the language from 0.10.x to 0.21.x. In the versions ranging from 0.22.x to 0.25.x various enhancements and an increased support for wider range of operating systems were introduced. Windows support was introduced with the version 2.7.x. Version 3.0.x. till 3.2.x. The latest version of the language, Puppet 4.x.x, was introduced in the year 2015. This version consisted of new type system, new parser, backward incompatibilities, and a number of other changes.
The use of Semantic Versioning standards was made by the developers from version 2 of the Puppet programming language. This was done for the management of different versions through the use of the following pattern: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
This indicates that the major versions do not contain the feature of backward compatibility. The minor versions, on the other hand, may go for introducing new features but keep the compatibility intact. Finally, PATCHES include bug fixes that are backward compatible.
