GitHub open-sources tool to track and preview Puppet changes

Ngoc Huynh

If tweaks to your Puppet setups are causing breakage across your deployments, GitHub’s Octocatalog-diff ensures that new Puppet settings don’t wreck old ones.

Puppet, the configuration management and automation tool for datacenters, forms a major portion of the infrastructure supporting code-hosting service GitHub.

GitHub has now open-sourced one of its key Puppet tools, a system for previewing the effects that changes in Puppet configurations will have across thousands of machines.

Octocatalog-diff is a Ruby app that allows modifications to Puppet code to be previewed in detail. Thus, users can “ensure not only that it serves the intended purpose for the role at hand, but also to avoid causing unexpected side effects on other roles,” as GitHub described in its blog post about the software.

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