Question Managing Plesk with puppet

[Christian Garling]

Hi there,

we are using puppet to manage our systems. Does anyone know, if there is a module around to manage Plesk? I searched several times but can't find anything.

If there is not such a module, I will write my own one. In this case, do you have any suggestions how to deal with Plesk best? In detail I want to manage the installation and the configuration (licenses, package definitions and so on) with puppet.

Any help is welcome.

Regards, Christian

 

[IgorG]

What is the benefit to using two systems for server management? Why is one system not enough? What about possible conflicts in configuration?

 

[Christian Garling]

Puppet is our standard for system management. From our sight Plesk is just an application to install and configure. I know that Plesk is even more like that.
But anyway, I still need a safe way to handle Plesk with puppet. Actually I have a lot of exec statements with a couple of status files. Only if a status file does not exist, the exec block will be executed.
This is not puppet style, so I am looking for a better way.

Regards, Christian

 

[IgorG]

Puppet is our standard for system management. From our sight Plesk is just an application to install and configure. I know that Plesk is even more like that.
But anyway, I still need a safe way to handle Plesk with puppet. Actually I have a lot of exec statements with a couple of status files. Only if a status file does not exist, the exec block will be executed.
This is not puppet style, so I am looking for a better way.

It is really not good idea to use Plesk under another management system. Actually, we strongly do not recommend to use Plesk on the same server with installed third-party management software. Consequences are unpredictable for such kind of mixed configuration.

 

[Sergey L]

Hi, actually puppet is used with Plesk at least in some hosting companies and it runs ok. Puppet can do a range of tasks which are not covered by Plesk, including to some degree mass-management of multiple Plesks. i.e. one of applications would be a consistent servers configuration according to some template/standard.

Safety rules are generally similar to regular server administration:

• don't ever directly change files managed by Plesk (they would have a warning on top) - work with predefined include-files instead, or call Plesk CLI for a target configuration
• use Plesk CLI when it comes to change Plesk setup. Avoid changes in Plesk DB by all means
  

Also

• when Plesk CLI is called to bring an item to a desired state, sometimes (as I have been told) it might cause unnecessary service restart/reconfiguration even though the state hasn't been changed. It might impact performance of a server where such "syncs" are frequent and domains are numerous. It is resolved by getting current status from Plesk CLI and comparing it to the current status. If you face such cases, feel free to report to us and indicate that it complicates puppet usage

I will be curious to know how it all worked for you if you can share the results later
Regards