Upgrading agents

The puppetlabs-puppet_agent module, available from the Forge, enables you to upgrade multiple agents at once. The module handles all the latest version to version upgrades.

1. On your master, download and install the puppetlabs-puppet_agent module: puppet module install puppetlabs-puppet_agent
2. Configure the master to download the agent version you want to upgrade.
   1. In the console, click Classification, and in the PE Infrastructure group, select the PE Master group.
   2. On the Configuration tab, in the Add a new class field, enter pe_repo, and select the appropriate repo class from the list of classes.

      Repo classes are listed as pe_repo::platform::<AGENT_OS_VERSION_ARCHITECTURE>.

   3. Click Add class and commit changes.
   4. On your master, run Puppet to configure the newly assigned class: puppet agent -t

      The new repo is created in /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/packages/public/<PE VERSION>/<PLATFORM>/.

3. Click Classification, click Add group, specify options for a new upgrade node group, and then click Add.

   • Parent name — Select the name of the classification node group that you want to set as the parent to this group, in this case, All Nodes.

   • Group name —Enter a name that describes the role of this classification node group, for example, agent_upgrade.

   • Environment — Select the environment your agents are in.

   • Environment group — Do not select this option. 

4. Click the link to Add membership rules, classes, and variables.
5. On the Rules tab, create a rule to add the agents that you want to upgrade to this group, click Add Rule, and then commit changes.
   For example:

   • Fact — osfamily

   • Operator — =

   • Value — RedHat

6. Still in the agent upgrade group, click the Configuration tab, and in the Add new class field, add the puppet_agent class, and click Add class.
   If you don’t immediately see the class, click Refresh to update the classifier.

   Note: If you’ve changed the prefix parameter of the pe_repo class in your PE Master node group, set the puppet-agent source parameter of the upgrade group to https://<MASTER HOSTNAME>:8140/<Prefix>.
7. In the puppet_agent class, specify the version of the puppet-agent package version that you want to install, then commit changes.

   Parameter	Value
   package_version	The puppet-agent package version to install, for example 5.3.3.

8. On the agents that you're upgrading, run Puppet: /opt/puppet/bin/puppet agent -t

To upgrade an individual node, for example to test or troubleshoot, you can upgrade directly from the node using a script. This method relies on a package repository hosted on your master.