Downloading the Puppet Learning VM

You now should have VirtualBox installed, which can run virtual machines for our isolated development environment.

We will be using the Puppet Learning VM Version 3.7.1, which I've uploaded to an Amazon S3 bucket.

The Puppet Learning VM is a virtual machine image that comes with preinstalled Puppet software. Installing Puppet is not a difficult or too time-consuming task, but it will save us all a little bit of our valuable time if we use the Puppet Learning VM, so we can start experimenting with Puppet quicker.

Follow these steps to complete the download process:

1. To download the Puppet Learning VM Version 3.7.1, go to http://learning-puppet-packt.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com, and click on the link that says To download Puppet Learning VM v.3.7.1 click here.
2. Once the download is finished, you should find a file called learn_puppet_centos-6.5-pe-3.7.1-ptb-ovf.zip in the download folder of your web browser.
3. Double-click on the learn_puppet_centos-6.5-pe-3.7.1-ptb-ovf.zip file to open the Zip file archive manager and extract the files to the filesystem.
4. At this stage, I'd recommend that you create a dedicated directory under your home directory that acts as a repository for virtual machine files as well as the Puppet manifest files that we will create later in this book.
5. Once the zip archive has been extracted to the directory, you should find the learn_puppet_centos-6.5.ovf and learn_puppet_centos-6.5-disk1.vmdk files on the disk.

Next, we will import the virtual machine to the VirtualBox, take a snapshot of it, and then we should be ready to start experimenting with Puppet.