Say Hello to Open Source Puppet 4!

Published on 15 April 2015 by
<span>Stephanie Stouck</span>
Stephanie Stouck

Production-ready Open Source Puppet 4 is now available! We’re excited to announce new features and enhancements that will extend your use of Puppet for faster, more consistent management of server configurations. We’ve added capabilities to help you save time, reduce errors, and increase reliability.

Gain More Power and Reduce Errors with a Modernized Puppet Language

During the past year, we’ve had new language changes available to the community for preview and testing. Thanks to your valuable feedback, we’ve completely rewritten the parser and evaluator, ironed out some kinks, and learned how these changes interacted with all of the Puppet manifests already out in the wild. In short, the future parser is no longer in the realm of the future. It’s here, and available by default. Also, the enhanced Puppet language delivers more power and greater reliability with smarter, more compact, code that is more human readable than ever before.

Save Time and Resources Installing and Updating Open Source Puppet

We recognize that installing and updating software can be tedious and frustrating, often involving manually moving files, potential duplication and time spent sorting out disparate deployment methods. Our goal was to provide a great installation experience regardless of the platform you are running. With Puppet 4, you get a simple, streamlined experience with an all-in-one (AIO) package that includes Puppet 4, both Facter 2.4 and CFacter 0.4, the latest Hiera and MCollective, Ruby 2.1.5, OpenSSL 1.0.0r and our gem dependencies.

Along with Puppet 4, we are introducing Puppet Collections, a new way of delivering our open source software to you. A Puppet Collection is a package repository that ensures our open source packages in a particular collection work together. Just think of it like a Linux distribution, but for Puppet-related packages. Be sure to review the Puppet Collections blog post to learn how these improvements will help you.

We're really excited to get this out to you, and are looking forward to your feedback. So please go try out Puppet 4 and let us know what you think!

Stephanie Stouck is principal product marketing manager at Puppet Labs.

Learn More

We’ve highlighted only a few of the new enhancements in this post, so here are some resources to help you get up to speed on all the new capabilities in Puppet 4:

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Great news! This looks very interesting and helpfull. Basically with the AIO package you do, what we kind of did by ourselves the last years.
What i miss in the AIO package is augeas - we desperately need that, because we use it for a lot of stuff. Do you plan to include it in the future AIO package releases?

Tim,
If you take a look at the Puppet Collections blog post mentioned above it states the following:
"The new puppet-agent package includes everything you need to have a fully functional agent: Ruby, Facter, Hiera, Augeas, Puppet and MCollective". So I think you'll be OK.
Josh.

Tim Eilers
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Josh,
you are correct - my fault.
I was worried by this blogpost https://puppetlabs.com/blog/release-candidate-open-source-puppet-4.0, which says nothing about augeas. Unfortunately it also says, that you will support SLES only (?) with Puppet Enterprise. Since we mainly use SLES, the AIO package will not be useful for us and we have to continue our current way of distribution.
Well, that is the downside of using the open source version - i can understand that you don't want to provide everything for free...

Great! We've been using all of the default-in-4 options in our 3.7 environment, such as future parser, so hopefully the migration won't be too painful.

Are there any plans to package for Solaris 11? If not, are the AIO build scripts published anywhere so that we might put something together?

What about OS X support? The release notes mentioned dropping support for older versions of OS X. So I assume "current" versions are supported, but I don't see installers on the OS X install page.

How come you have had a jessie repository for ages that was always and still is (Even now that Jessie is released) empty? Why can't stable Debian get some love?

A few days ago, lucid packages were removed from apt.puppetlabs.com (the Ubuntu 10 packages). This has left us in a whole lot of trouble since we were in the middle of upgrading servers from Ubuntu 10 to 12 and basically the update path is broken now (we used puppet to update).

We have these servers deployed in customer sites and they are pointing to that address and were relying on those files. Is there any way to have Puppet open source continue hosting those files for a while longer? We don't need support or anything, just the same files put back where they were.

It is very uncommon for open source packages to be yanked out like this!!

Thanks for reaching out. Ubuntu 10.04 has been unsupported since late April. We made an announcement on the Puppet developers group in April and removed it from our repos in early June. https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!ms…

We have done this in the past with other EOL platforms. There has been some discussion around how we support these EOL platforms in the future. I'll be sure to pass along your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Would you please make the puppet-agent source RPM available on the Puppetlabs Yum repo? I'm running puppet agents on ZVM (s390x) and so far have been unable to compile puppet-agent for zLinux/ZVM.

Source RPM : puppet-agent-1.3.4-1.el7.src.rpm

Thanks for reaching out Brian. We have opened up the puppet-agent git repository.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/VdcIu56irMU

A great resource for locating this type of information and asking questions is puppet-users: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/puppet-users. We may have already addressed your topic and can answer your question quickly getting you to the information you need.

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