Component versions in puppet-agent

Release contents of puppet-agent 5.x

See the table for details about which components shipped in which puppet-agent release, and the package-specific release notes for more information about packaging and installation fixes and features.

Note: Hiera 5 is a backwards-compatible evolution of Hiera, which is built into Puppet. To provide some backwards-compatible features, it uses the classic Hiera 3 codebase. This means “Hiera” is still shown as version 3.x in the table above, even though this Puppet version uses Hiera 5.

What puppet-agent and Puppet Server are

We distribute Puppet as two core packages.

• puppet-agent — This package contains Puppet’s main code and all of the dependencies needed to run it, including Facter, Hiera, and bundled versions of Ruby and OpenSSL. It also includes MCollective. Once it’s installed, you have everything you need to run the Puppet agent service and the puppet apply command.
• puppetserver — This package depends on puppet-agent, and adds the JVM-based Puppet Server application. Once it’s installed, Puppet Server can serve catalogs to nodes running the Puppet agent service.

How version numbers work

Puppet Server is a separate application that, among other things, runs instances of the Puppet master application. It has its own version number separate from the version of Puppet it runs and may be compatible with more than one existing Puppet version.

The puppet-agent package also has its own version number, which doesn’t necessarily match the version of Puppet it installs.

Order is important in the upgrade process. First, update Puppet Server, then you update puppet-agent. If you upgrade Puppet Server or PuppetDB to version 5, if you’re on the master it will automatically upgrade the puppet-agent package to Puppet agent 5.0.0. Puppet Server 5 will also prevent you from installing anything lower than puppet-agent 5.0.0 on your agent nodes.

Since the puppet-agent package distributes several different pieces of software, its version number will frequently increase when Puppet’s version does not — for example, puppet-agent 1.2.0 and 1.2.1 shipped the same Puppet version but different Facter versions. Similarly, new versions of Puppet Server usually don’t require updates to the core Puppet code.

This versioning scheme helps us avoid a bunch of “empty” Puppet releases where the version number increases without any changes to Puppet itself.