Puppet Server

Puppet Server is the next-generation application for managing Puppet agents. This platform implements Puppet's server-side components in a more distributed, service-oriented architecture. We've built Puppet Server on top of the same technologies that make PuppetDB successful, and which allow us to greatly improve performance, scalability, advanced metrics collection, and fine-grained control over the Ruby runtime.

While Puppet Server is designed to replace the deprecated Apache/Passenger Puppet master stack, they diverge in a handful of ways due to differences in Puppet Server's underlying architecture. See Puppet Server vs. Apache/Passenger Puppet Master for details.

Release notes

For information about the current and most recent versions of Puppet Server, see the release notes.

Installing Puppet Server

All versions of Puppet Server depend on at least Puppet 3.7.3, and since version 2.3 it depends on Puppet Agent 1.4.0 or newer, which installs Puppet 4.4 and compatible versions of its related tools and dependencies on the server. Puppet agents running older versions of Puppet Agent can connect to Puppet Server 2.3; this requirement applies to the Puppet Agent running on the Puppet Server node only.

If you install Puppet Server on a system running an older version of Puppet, installation also upgrades Puppet. See Installing Puppet Server from Packages for complete installation requirements and instructions.

Ruby and Puppet Server

Puppet Server uses its own JRuby interpreter, which doesn't load gems or other code from your system Ruby. If you want Puppet Server to load additional gems, use the Puppet Server-specific gem command to install them. See Puppet Server and Gems for more information about gems and Puppet Server.

Ruby extension code in your modules needs to run under both Ruby 1.9 and Ruby 2.1. This is because Puppet Server runs Puppet functions and custom resource types under JRuby 1.7 (which is a Ruby 1.9-compatible interpreter), and the official puppet-agent releases run custom facts and types/providers under MRI Ruby 2.1.

Configuration

Puppet Server honors almost all settings in puppet.conf and should pick them up automatically. However, we have also introduced some new settings specific to Puppet Server. See the Configuration documentation for details.

For more information on the differences between Puppet Server's support for puppet.conf settings and the Ruby master's, see our documentation of differences in puppet.conf.

Certificate authority configuration

Much of the documentation on External CA Support for the Ruby Puppet Master still applies to using an external certificate authority in conjunction with Puppet Server. There are some differences to bear in mind, however; see the External CA Configuration page for details.

SSL configuration

In network configurations that require external SSL termination, you need to do a few things differently in Puppet Server. See External SSL Termination for details.

Command-line utilities

Puppet Server provides several command-line utilities for development and debugging purposes. These commands are all aware of puppetserver.conf, as well as the gems and Ruby code specific to Puppet Server and Puppet, while keeping them isolated from your system Ruby.

For more information, see Puppet Server Subcommands.

Known issues

As this application is still in development, there are a few known issues that you should be aware of.

Developer documentation

If want to play with our code, these documents should prove useful:

Puppet Server also uses the Trapperkeeper Clojure framework.

Branching strategy

Puppet Server's branching strategy is documented on the GitHub repo wiki.

Issue tracker

Have feature requests, found a bug, or want to see what issues are in flight? Visit our JIRA project.

License

Distributed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Special thanks to

Cursive Clojure

Cursive is a Clojure IDE based on IntelliJ IDEA. Several of us at Puppet use it regularly and couldn't live without it. It's got some really great editing, refactoring, and debugging features, and the author, Colin Fleming, has been amazingly helpful and responsive when we have feedback. If you're a Clojure developer, you should definitely check it out!

JRuby

JRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language that runs on the JVM. It's a fantastic project, and the bridge that allows us to run Puppet Ruby code while taking advantage of the JVM's advanced features and libraries. We're very grateful to the developers for building such a great product and for helping us work through a few bugs that we've discovered along the way.

Maintenance

Maintainers: See the MAINTAINERS file

Tickets: For issues in o/s only: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/SERVER. For issues in PE: https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PE. Set component = Puppet Server

dbalagansky / puppetserver