Once you have pypuppetdb installed you can configure it to connect to PuppetDB and take it from there.
The first thing you need to do is to connect with PuppetDB:
>>> from pypuppetdb import connect
>>> db = connect()
The following will return a generator object yielding Node objects for every returned node from PuppetDB.
>>> nodes = db.nodes()
>>> for node in nodes:
>>> print(node)
host1
host2
...
To query a single node the singular node() can be used:
>>> node = db.node('hostname')
>>> print(node)
hostname
The Node objects are a bit more special in that they can query for facts and resources themselves. Using those methods from a node object will automatically add a query to the request scoping the request to the node.
>>> node = db.node('hostname')
>>> print(node.fact('osfamily'))
osfamily/hostname
>>> facts = db.facts('osfamily')
>>> for fact in facts:
>>> print(fact)
osfamily/host1
osfamily/host2
That queries PuppetDB for the ‘osfamily’ fact and will yield Fact objects, one per node this fact is known for.
>>> resources = db.resources('file')
Will return a generator object containing all file resources you’re managing across your infrastructure. This is probably a bad idea if you have a big number of nodes as the response will be huge.
If PuppetDB and the tool that’s using pypuppetdb aren’t located on the same machine you will have to connect securely to PuppetDB using client certificates according to PuppetDB’s default configuration.
You can also tell PuppetDB to accept plain connections from anywhere instead of just the local machine but don’t do that.
On your Puppet Master or dedicated Puppet CA server:
$ puppet cert generate <service_name>
Once that’s done you’ll need to get the public and private keyfile and copy them over. You can find those in Puppet’s $ssldir, usually /var/lib/puppet/ssl:
- private key: $ssldir/private_keys/<service_name>.pem
- public key: $ssldir/ca/signed/<service_name>.pem
Once you have those you can pass them to pypuppetdb’s connect():
>>> db = connect(ssl_key='/path/to/private.pem', ssl_cert='/path/to/public.pem')
If both ssl_key and ssl_cert are provided pypuppetdb will automatically switch over to using HTTPS instead.
By default pypuppetdb will also verify the certificate PuppetDB is serving. This means that the authority that signed PuppetDB’s server certificate, most likely your Puppet Master, must be part of the trusted set of certificates for your OS or must be added to that set. Those certificates are usually found in /etc/ssl/certs on Linux-y machines.
For Debian, install your Puppet Master’s certificate in /usr/local/share/ca-certifiactes with a .crt extension and then run dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates as per /usr/share/doc/ca-certificates/README.Debian. This of course requires the ca-certificates package to be installed.
If you do not wish to do so or for whatever reason want to disable the verification of PuppetDB’s certificate you can pass in ssl_verify=False.