Community Spotlight: Puppet Debugger

Pulling the Strings

Episode | Podcast

Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2019 21:10:00 +0000

<p>We're kicking off 2019 with a bang and a series of spotlights on notable community members and their achievements. We've got some great shows lined up for you, from useful development tools, to community experiences, to lessons we could learn from the history of computing. Let's get started today with Corey Osman of Portland, Oregon who's built a command line <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read–eval–print_loop) debugging tool for Puppet">REPL</a>. </p><p>This quick screencast shows some of the capabilities of the tool:</p><p>![Puppet debugger REPL in action.](/sites/default/files/2018-12/animated-debugger-demo-smaller.gif)</p><p>A REPL, or command-line shell, allows you to interactively work within Puppet and see what effect each line of code you write will have. Rather than trying to understand an entire system at once, you can drop into the shell and try out a language construct or see how a variable will be interpolated. For even greater understanding, you can add breakpoints to your Puppet code so you can stop compilation at a known spot and inspect your variables or see what classes have been declared.</p><p>Today's musical intro was recorded by Michelle on our SRE team and her band, <a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-995818145/spinning-8318">Great Niece</a>.</p><p> </p><p>Learn more</p><p>• <a href="https://www.puppet-debugger.com">https://www.puppet-debugger.com</a></p><p>• <a href="https://github.com/nwops/puppet-debugger">https://github.com/nwops/puppet-debugger</a></p><p>• <a href="http://logicminds.github.io/categories/debugger">http://logicminds.github.io/categories/debugger</a></p><p> </p><p><i>*Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*</i></p>