Using Puppet for introspection

In this section, we’ll show you how you can use Puppet to introspect your WebLogic server. In general in Puppet to introspect any resource, you use the command:

$ puppet resource <puppet_type> [<resource_name>]

When you ask Puppet to fetch a WebLogic resource, it fetches all properties of all resources. This can be quite time consuming. So be prepared to wait a moment.

Looking at your Weblogic server with puppet

Standard, however, Puppet doesn’t know about WebLogic. There is a set of wls_ types extending puppet, so it now knows about Oracle WebLogic and what is inside. First off, we will take a look at the list of types created for WebLogic management.

So to see what types are provided to manage your server, enter the next command.

puppet resource --types | grep ^wls_

The command will list all the types existing in puppet resource and filters the output for those starting with wls prefix.

Puppet knows about your WebLogic servers too

In the last section, we showed you what types are provided in our Puppet modules to introspect your WebLogic servers. In this section, we will get a close look at the wls_server type.

TEASER: introspection is the prequel to creating and managing WebLogic servers with the Puppet.

Introspect available WebLogic servers

Remember the general command for introspecting?

puppet resource <puppet_type> [<resource_name>]

For WebLogic servers, the Puppet type is wls_server. So the command becomes.

puppet resource wls_server

The output of this command can be used as a starting point for defining new WebLogic servers.

When you ask Puppet to fetch a WebLogic resource, it fetches all properties of all resources. This can be quite time consuming. So be prepared to wait a moment.

Creating a server with Puppet from the command line

We have been using Puppet from the command line for introspecting. But you can also use puppet on the command line for creating and changing WebLogic resources. To do this we again use the puppet resource command.

The general command for making sure a resource exists is:

puppet resource <puppet_type> [<resource_name>] ensure=present

“Making sure a resource exists” means that when it doesn’t exist, Puppet will create it for us.

Let’s use this to create a new server with the name MY_TEST_SERVER.

Create the WebLogic server

The command to make this happen is:

puppet resource wls_server MYDOMAIN/MY_TEST_SERVER ensure=present

This can take upto 60 seconds, so please have some patience.

Modifying a server with Puppet from the command line

The server MY_TEST_SERVER exist now, but it has the default properties. With the same command as the command to create it, you can also set other properties of the WebLogic server.

Setting the logintimeout

The logintimeout of the server the HTTP Login Timeout of the server in milliseconds. It is 5000 at its default value. Let’s increase it 10 times and set it 50000.

We can use the same puppet resource command and append the change.

puppet resource wls_server MYDOMAIN/MY_TEST_SERVER logintimeout=50000

More information about properties managed by Puppet can be found on Enterprise Modules documentation website.## You like it?

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