Deprecated settings

The following Puppet settings are deprecated and will be removed in Puppet 5.0.

The legacy auth.conf file

Puppet Server 2.2 and higher use a new, HOCON-based auth.conf file, which is a full replacement for the old auth.conf format. Support for the old file will be removed in Puppet 5.0 (and the Puppet Server version that supports it). Puppet Server’s old client-whitelist settings for the /puppet-ca/v1/certificate_status and /puppet-admin-api endpoints will be removed at the same time.

• The new auth.conf file is located at /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/conf.d/auth.conf.
• The old auth.conf file is located at $confdir/auth.conf.

Authorization rules in fileserver.conf

Before auth.conf existed, fileserver.conf let you specify authorization rules for the file server on a per-mountpoint basis. After authorization was centralized, this was redundant; all authorization rules should go in auth.conf (new style).

In Puppet 5.0 (and the Puppet Server version that supports it), “allow” and “deny” rules in fileserver.conf will not be allowed.

cfacter

The cfacter setting was used to enable pre-releases of native Facter (distributed as the “cfacter” package) prior to the release of Facter 3.0. Now that native Facter is the default in puppet-agent packages, this setting has no purpose.

configtimeout

The configtimeout setting mashed the connect and read timeouts together, which could cause erroneous timeouts if everything was working fine but Puppet was transferring a very large file.

It’s been replaced by two new settings:

• http_connect_timeout — controls how long Puppet should attempt to make a connection. A short timeout for this is sensible, since an over-long connect time usually means something’s wrong.
• http_read_timeout — controls how long Puppet should allow transfers to continue. It’s normal to let this last a long time or be infinite, since some things just take a while to compile or download.

The old configtimeout setting now logs a deprecation warning if it’s set, and will be removed in Puppet 5.0.

ignorecache

The ignorecache setting has no effect, and has been dead code since Puppet 0.24.5.

This setting does not log a deprecation warning. Once it is removed in Puppet 5.0, Puppet will fail to start if you pass --ignorecache as a command line argument.

pluginsync

For all practical purposes, pluginsync = true (the default value) is mandatory for all Puppet users. If pluginsync is disabled, it becomes difficult or impossible to use custom facts, custom resource types, and custom providers, all of which are crucial parts of the Puppet ecosystem.

Since disabling it is catastrophic and has no particular benefit, we will remove the option to do so in Puppet 5.0.