h1. Foreman can act as a classifier to Puppet through the external nodes interface.

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h2. Import your environment and classes setup

First of all, you probably want to let Foreman know about your setup, its recommended to automatically import your Environments and classes by:

<pre>

rake puppet:import:puppet_classes RAILS_ENV=production

</pre>

If you prefer, you may manually add classes through the setting page, however, the class names must match Puppet classes.

h2. Define classes and variables per host

You can define per host, classes and variables(parameters), simply create/edit a host, and select its classes.

if you see an empty list, make sure that you do have classes (as define in the step above).

If you want to add variables(parameters), simply add them in the same page as a set name and value.

h2. Host Groups

Foreman allows you to group classes, into common groups similar to node inheritances in puppet 

Each group can contain many classes, and variables.

If you wish to override the parameters for a specific host, create a parameter with the same name in the host level, 

Foreman will override the values defined in the group level.

h2. Other places you can define parameters

It is also possible to define default (common) parameters for all of your hosts (setting -> Global parameters).

Additionally, you can also define them on the domain level (settings -> Domain -> Domain Parameters)

*The order in which the parameters are processed is:

Global, Domain, Host Group and Node, the last occurrence of the parameter will be the one used.

*

h2. Example puppet script

under the *extras/externalnodes* directory you would find an example script to query Foreman DB.

You would need to setup puppet to use external nodes 

<pre>  external_nodes = /etc/puppet/node.rb

  node_terminus  = exec</pre>

For additional info please see "Puppet documentation":http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/ExternalNodes

h2. Verify your setup

You may also click on the YAML link to see the output that would be used for puppet external nodes.