Backing up and restoring Puppet Enterprise

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Back up your PE infrastructure
Restore your infrastructure
Backup and restore reference

Keep regular backups of your PE infrastructure. Backups allow you to more easily migrate to a new master, troubleshoot, and quickly recover in the case of system failures.

Note: These instructions are for monolithic installations only. Split installations, where the master, console, and PuppetDB are installed on separate nodes, are deprecated in PE. We recommend migrating from an existing split installation to a monolithic installation—with or without compilers—and a standalone PE-PostgreSQL node. See the docs for how to Migrate from a split to a monolithic installation.

Important: Always store your backups in a safe location that you can access if your master fails. Backup files are not encrypted, so secure these as you would any sensitive information.

You can use the puppet-backup command to back up and restore your primary master or master of masters in monolithic installations only. You can't use this command to back up split installations or compile masters. By default, the backup command creates a backup of:

Your PE configuration, including license, classification, and RBAC settings. However, configuration backup does not include Puppet gems or Puppet Server gems.
PE CA certificates and the full SSL directory.
The Puppet code deployed to your code directory at backup time.
PuppetDB data, including facts, catalogs and historical reports.

Each time you create a new backup, PE creates a single, timestamped backup file, named in the format pe_backup-<TIMESTAMP>.tgz. This file includes everything you're backing up. By default, PE writes backup files to /var/puppetlabs/backups, but you can change this location when you run the backup command. When you restore, specify the backup file you want to restore from.

If you are restoring to a previously existing master, uninstall and reinstall PE before restoring your infrastructure. If you are restoring or migrating your infrastructure to a master with a different hostname than the previous master, you'll redirect your agents to the new master during the restore process. In both cases, the freshly installed PE must be the same PE version that was in use when you backed up the files.

By default, backup and restore functions include your Puppet configuration, certificates, code, and PuppetDB. However, you can limit the scope of backup and restore with command line options. This allows you to back up to or restore from multiple files. This is useful if you want to back up some parts of your infrastructure more often than others.

For example, if you have frequent code changes, you might back up the code more often than you back up the rest of your infrastructure. When you limit backup scope, the backup file contains only the specified parts of your infrastructure. Be sure to give your backup file a name that identifies the scope so that you always know what a given file contains.

During restore, you must restore all scopes: code, configuration, certificates, and PuppetDB. However, you can restore each scope from different files, either by restoring from backup files with limited scope or by limiting the scope of the restore. For example, by specifying scope when you run the restore command, you could restore code, configuration, and certificates from one backup file and PuppetDB from a different one.

Back up your PE infrastructure

PE backup creates a copy of your Puppet infrastructure, including configuration, certificates, code, and PuppetDB.

Before you begin

You can back up monolithic masters only, whether they are the only master or master of masters. The backup and restore commands are not supported for split installations or compile masters.

On your primary master, from the command line logged in as root, run puppet-backup create

To change the default command behavior, pass option flags and values to the command. See the backup and restore reference for a complete list of options.

For example, to limit a backup to certain parts of your PE infrastructure, pass the --scope option, specifying the scopes in a comma-separated list. To change the name of your backup file, pass the --name option with a string specifying the filename. For example, to back up PuppetDB only and name your file with the scope and date, run:

puppet-backup create --scope=puppetdb --name=puppetdb_backup_03032018.tgz

By default, if you don't specify the --dir or --name options, PE creates files to /var/puppetlabs/backups and names them with a timestamp, such as pe_backup-<TIMESTAMP>.tgz

After backing up, you can move your backup files to another location. Always store your backups in a safe location that is not on the master.

Restore your infrastructure

Use the restore commands to migrate your PE master to a new host or to recover from system failure.

Before you begin

Remember that you must restore files to a fresh installation of the same version of PE used in your backup file.

If you are restoring to an existing master, purge any existing PE installation from it.
1. On the master, uninstall PE by running sudo /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet-enterprise-uninstaller -p -d
2. Ensure that the directories /opt/puppetlabs/ and /etc/puppetlabs/ are no longer present on the system.
For details about uninstalling PE, see the uninstalling documentation.
Install PE on the master you are restoring to. This must be the same PE version that was used for the backup files.
1. If you don't have the PE installer script on the machine you want to restore to, download the installer tarball to the machine from the download site, and unpack it by running tar -xf <TARBALL_FILENAME>
2. Navigate to the directory containing the install script. The installer script is located in the PE directory created when you unpacked the tarball.
3. Install PE by running sudo ./puppet-enterprise-installer
For details about the PE installation process, see the installing documentation.
On the master logged in as root, restore your PE infrastructure by running puppet-backup restore <BACKUP-FILENAME>
To change the default command behavior, pass option flags and values to the command. See the command reference for a complete list of options.
For example, to restore your scope, certificates, and code from one backup file, but your PuppetDB data from another, pass the --scope option:
```
puppet-backup restore pe_backup-2018-03-03_20.07.15_UTC.tgz --scope=config,certs,code

puppet-backup restore pe_backup-2018-04-04_20.07.15_UTC.tgz --scope=puppetdb
```
Restore your backup of the secret key used to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data stored in the inventory service.
The secret key is stored at: /etc/puppetlabs/orchestration-services/conf.d/secrets/keys.json
CAUTION: The restore command does not include the secret key. You must restore this information separately.
Ensure the secret key ownership is pe-orchestration-services:pe-orchestration-services.
Restart the pe-orchestration-services service.
If you restored PE onto a master with a different hostname than the original installation, and you have not configured the dns_alt_names setting in the pe.conf file, redirect your agents to the new master. An easy way to do this is by running a task with the Bolt task runner.
1. Download and install Bolt , if you don't already have it installed.
2. Download and install the puppet_conf module from the Forge.
3. Update the puppet.conf file to point all agents at the new master by running:
```
bolt task run puppet_conf action=set section=agent setting=server value=<RESTORE_HOSTNAME> --nodes <COMMA-SEPARATED LIST OF NODES>
                     
```
4. Run the agent on all nodes by running:
```
bolt command run "puppet agent -t" --nodes <COMMA-SEPARATED LIST OF NODES>
```
If your infrastructure had Code Manager enabled when your backup file was created, deploy your code by running:
```
puppet access login
puppet code deploy --all --wait       
```
Test the agents' connection to the master by running puppet agent --test

Backup and restore reference

Use these options to change the backup and restore scope and other options for the puppet-backup command.

Note: Backup commands must be run as root.

puppet-backup create

Run the puppet-backup create command to create backup files of your PE infrastructure.

Usage:

puppet-backup create [--dir=<DIRECTORY_PATH>] [--name=<BACKUP_NAME>.tgz] [--scope=<SCOPE_LIST>] [--force]


Option	Description	Values	Default
`--dir=BACKUP_DIR`	Specifies the directory to write the backup file to.	A valid filepath that the pe-postgres user has write permission for.	`/var/puppetlabs/backups/`
`--name=BACKUP_NAME.tgz`	Specifies the name for the backup file.	A string designating a file name.	`pe_backup-<TIMESTAMP>.tgz`
`--pe-environment=ENVIRONMENT`	Specifies the environment to back up. To ensure configuration is recovered correctly, this should be the environment where your master is located.	A valid environment name.	`production`
`--scope=SCOPE`	Scope of backup to create.	Either `all` or any combination of the other available scopes, as a comma-separated list: `config`: PE configuration including license, classification, and RBAC settings. Does not include Puppet gems or Puppet Server gems. `certs`: PE CA certificates and full SSL directory `code`: Puppet code deployed to your codedir at backup time. `puppetdb`: PuppetDB data, including facts, catalogs, and historical reports `all`: All listed scopes.	`all`
`--force`	Bypass validation checks and ignore warnings.	None.	If you don't specify `--force`, PE verifies that the destination directory exists and has enough space for the backup process.

For example, to create a backup of PuppetDB only and give it a name that shows the scope of the file:

puppet-backup create --scope=puppetdb --name=puppetdb_backup_03032018.tgz

puppet-backup restore

Run the puppet-backup restore command to restore your PE infrastructure from backup files.