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April 19, 2023
When Did PDK Come Out? This and More Puppet Developer Kit (PDK) FAQs
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From its inception to today, we get a lot of questions about the past and future of the Puppet Developer Kit (PDK). In this article, we will provide a few answers to the most common questions, as well as a roadmap ahead.
Table of Contents:
- What is the Puppet Developer Kit?
- When Did PDK Come Out?
- What's the Future of PDK?
- What About PCT and PRM?
- Where Can I Provide PDK Feedback?
What is the Puppet Developer Kit?
The Puppet Developer Kit was launched to help our users develop high quality modules faster and over the years, it has seen regular development towards that goal.
When Did PDK Come Out?
The Puppet Developer Kit was launched in 2017 to be a single install that would provide everything you needed to write, lint, test and publish a Puppet module — and for the most part, that's what it did.
What Worked
The PDK did exactly what it set out to do. It enabled users of Puppet and its ecosystem — regardless of experience level — to create Modules that were testable, deployable, and shareable. It provided functionality to keep those modules running against all supported Puppet versions, as well as the core Gemset to run all the features built into the template.
What Didn’t Work
In order for all this to work, the PDK hinged on that single template which was maintained by the Puppet Developer Experience (PDE) team.
Since its launch, the PDK has come to support the creation of more than just modules and classes. With each successive addition, the template and the packaging system had to support more dependencies, and these dependencies needed to be monitored and updated in line with Puppet agent support and things like security fixes.
This overhead meant the PDK couldn’t move forward quickly in supporting the wealth of content our users wanted. And every new feature made the template system much more complex and awkward to customize for your own needs.
What's the Future of PDK?
There are a few things that you can look forward to for PDK:
- We will continue to build on the platform that we already have.
- We will be releasing 3.0 with support for Puppet 8 and Ruby3
- We'll focus on reducing the weight and complexity of the current package The “pdk-templates” experience will be redesigned to make consumption easier
Our priority is to meet the needs of PDK users. We want to better understand who uses PDK, why they are using it, and what they are looking for to make PDK functional and effective.
What About PCT and PRM?
The work that was done on PCT and PRM deserves a shout out — it took time, it took effort, and it was no small feat. We appreciate everyone who contributed to both PCT and PRM —thank you.
With that excellent work as a foundation, we took the learnings from the PCT design as a foundation for the future of PDK. Almost all of the patterns will ideally be ported back in to PDK to form the new pdk-templates.
You can visit the PCT and PRM toy chests to revisit past work.
Where Can I Provide PDK Feedback?
Feedback is so important to us. Our team would love to engage with our community about our roadmap and we hope that you can see yourself using these tools in the future. Your feedback can have a real impact on what we build.
To get in touch, the CAT Office Hours are every Tuesday at 3pm GMT. Outside of those hours, other members within the Puppet Slack community may be able to help!
You can also check out our Puppet Community Calendar for the latest community events and other ways to stay in touch with Puppet.
Participate in the PDK Community:
GET SUPPORT FOR PDK FROM PUPPET
This article has been revised in April 2023 for accuracy and the latest information about PDK.