Generating manifests with other tools

If you want to quickly capture the complete configuration of a running system as a Puppet manifest, there are a couple of tools available to help. In this example, we'll look at Blueprint, which is designed to examine a machine and dump its state as Puppet code.

Getting ready

Here's what you need to do to prepare your system to use Blueprint.

Run the following command to install Blueprint; we'll use puppet resource here to change the state of the python-pip package:

[root@cookbook ~]# puppet resource package python-pip ensure=installed
Notice: /Package[python-pip]/ensure: created
package { 'python-pip':
  ensure => '1.3.1-4.el6',
}
[root@cookbook ~]# pip install blueprint
Downloading/unpacking blueprint
  Downloading blueprint-3.4.2.tar.gz (59kB): 59kB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package blueprint
Installing collected packages: blueprint
  Running setup.py install for blueprint
    changing mode of build...