Running Puppet Master on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

As of a few hours after this post, I’ve given up trying to get Puppet Master running on Snow Leopard. There appears to be an issue with the SSL certificates generated that’s preventing puppetd from getting it’s recipes. There doesn’t appear to be any way to disable this. I have switched to a CentOS VM, which worked perfectly the first time. The Unixy underpinnings of my Mac seem to be getting less and less useful every day.

I kept getting the below error when trying to start puppet, even though I had created the user and group through the accounts prefs pane. Apparently that’s not good enough for the PuppetMaster to run.

For some reason this figuring this out was a huge pain. These are the steps I took to getting it installed. If it looks simple, well, that’s because it really is. Most people suggest solving this with MacPorts, but then I still wouldn’t know how to set up users and groups on Snow Leopard, so I’d just be screwing myself over in the long run.

Anyways, here’s the error I was getting:

err: /File[/var/puppet/rrd]: Failed to retrieve current state of resource:
Could not find group puppet

How to solve:

1. Install Facter and Puppet


This is easy enough – Snow Leopard comes with Ruby by default. Both can be downloaded from the Reductive Labs download page.

2. Install Server Admin Tools.


As of this blog entry, you can find them in Apple’s downloads section, although it was kind of a pain to find.

3. Enable Remote Management for youself


I was not able to connect to localhost until I enabled this option. You can control which users have management rights, so I’m not to concerned here.

4. Create user and group for puppet.


Use the GUI tool to create new a puppet user and group. You should now be able to start the pupptermasterd (yay!)

I’ll expand this post if I realize I forgot anything, or if questions come in.