How To allow unexperienced users to use my Puppet module

Question

I am developing opensouce project with a huge pile of dependencies, and I find Puppet a perfect tool for my requirements.

However, my target audience is not necessarily experienced with Puppet. To the point they may not be even know how web servers work. So I would like to ask the user to “run this in terminal” for the simplest case, but if the user also wants to configure some parts of my software, he would have to learn puppet. And educating them Puppet defeats the “servers for dummies” purpose of my project.

Basically, dare I say, I need Unity from the deployment world.

The thing I came up with, is to use 'json' as a backend for Puppet, and then write some GUI tool that would generate/modify that json using JSON Schema. Of couse, this thing will be optional and experient Puppet usets could still just use my module as is.

The questiond is, am I doing it right? Is there a solution for my problem?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

These are some things that you can use. Have a look at these:-

https://puphpet.com/

https://github.com/voxpupuli/puppetboard

Answer 2

You can use Hieradata to give the ability to users to configure some parts for your "Software". you can put your hiera configuration in a git repository or build a tool to edit & update this hiera configuration.

There is some tools that you can use in order to make more easier for your users like Foreman and Puppetboard

But I think it's mandatory for your users to have a basic knowledge of Puppet so they can debug or manipulate the software.