We’re excited about the release of our book, Puppet Types and Providers, published by O’Reilly. Writing this book with Dan Bode has been a great experience. We both enjoy writing blogs and documentation, but this is our first attempt at writing a book. During the process, we both learned a lot about both writing as well as the internals of Puppet itself.

There are already several books published on Puppet. Most of these books cover specifics of how to write Puppet manifests, or how to manage Puppet infrastructure. There is currently no comprehensive documentation on how to extend Puppet resources beyond some blog posts.

In our experience as professional service consultants and in a business development capacity for Puppet Labs, we often leveraged the Type and Provider APIs. We had to stumble through the source code to properly understand certain behaviors of the API. We are happy to share our collective experience on the subject with the greater Puppet community through this book.

The power of Puppet lies in its ability to manage the state of complex systems using a simple resource model. Our new book discusses the highly extensible resource model and the framework around it. It also explores the extension points and how to leverage them to expand Puppet’s functionality.

Writing types and providers in Ruby allows current Puppet users to level-up their deployments. If you find yourself composing manifests with a lot of exec resources to interact with the underlying system, then writing custom providers is a much more robust alternative. This allows users to implement custom resources that can interface with systems via Ruby to perform management tasks.

We spent a considerable amount of effort polishing the content for this book, and we are excited to share our collective experience writing Type and Providers with our readers. Because this is our first foray into writing a book, we hope to receive feedback from our readers and look forward to any constructive criticism.

Now, where can you find Puppet Types and Providers? You can purchase an Ebook or print copy of the book through O’Reilly’s website… or you can enter to win a FREE copy by simply subscribing to the Puppet Labs newsletter. We’ll randomly pick 20 people who subscribe to the newsletter by December 31, 2012.

Sign up for our newsletter for a chance to win a free copy of the Puppet Types and Providers book!

Good luck!

Learn more:

• Secure a copy of the Puppet Types and Providers book
• Provide feedback by submitting an errata or leaving a comment below
• Documentation on custom types
• Information about writing providers to provide implementation for types
• Example of a simple resource type and provider
• Richard Crowley’s slides on extending Puppet
• Masterzen’s blog on Puppet extension points

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