Configuration: How Puppet is configured

Puppet’s commands and services can be extensively configured, and its settings can be specified in a variety of places.

Main settings and extra config files

When we mention “settings” in the context of Puppet, we usually mean the main settings. These are the settings that are listed in the configuration reference. They are valid in puppet.conf and available for use on the command line. These settings configure nearly all of Puppet’s core features.

However, there are also about nine extra configuration files — things like auth.conf and puppetdb.conf. These files exist for several reasons:

The main settings only support a few types of values. Some things just can’t be configured without complex data structures, so they needed separate files. (Authorization rules and custom CSR attributes are in this category.)
Puppet currently doesn’t allow extensions to add new settings to puppet.conf. This means some settings that should be main settings (like the PuppetDB server) can’t be.

Puppet Server configuration

Puppet Server honors almost all settings in puppet.conf and should pick them up automatically. However, for some tasks, such as configuring the webserver or an external Certificate Authority, there are Puppet Server-specific configuration files and settings.

See Puppet Server: Configuration

Settings are loaded on startup

When any Puppet command or service starts up, it gets values for all of its settings. Any of these settings could change the way that command or service behaves.

A command or service only reads its settings once; if something needs to be reconfigured, it needs to be restarted or run again.

Settings on the command line

Settings from the command line have top priority, and always override settings from the config file. When a Puppet command or service is started, you can specify any setting as a command line option.

Settings require two hyphens and the name of the setting on the command line:

$ sudo puppet agent --test --noop --certname temporary-name.example.com

Basic settings

For most settings, you specify the option and follow it with a value. An equals sign between the two (=) is optional, and you can optionally put values in quotes.

All three of these are equivalent to setting certname = temporary-name.example.com in puppet.conf:

--certname=temporary-name.example.com

--certname temporary-name.example.com

--certname "temporary-name.example.com"

Boolean settings

Settings whose only valid values are true and false, use a shorter format. Specifying the option alone sets the setting to true, or prefixing the option with no- sets it to false.

This means:

--noop is equivalent to setting noop = true in puppet.conf.

--no-noop is equivalent to setting noop = false in puppet.conf.

Default values

If a setting isn’t specified on the command line or in puppet.conf, it falls back to a default value. Default values for all settings are listed in the configuration reference.

Some default values are based on other settings — when this is the case, the default is shown using the other setting as a variable (similar to $ssldir/certs).

Configuring locale settings

Puppet 5.1 added support for locale-specific strings in output, and it detects your locale from your system configuration. This provides localized strings, report messages, and log messages for the locale’s language when available.

Upon startup, Puppet looks for a set of environment variables on *nix systems, or the code page setting on Windows. When Puppet finds one that is set, it uses that locale whether it is run from the command line or as a service.

For help setting your operating system’s locale or adding new locales, consult its documentation. This section covers setting the locale for Puppet services.

Checking your locale settings on *nix and macOS

To check your current locale settings, run the locale command. This outputs the settings used by your current shell.

$ locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

To see which locales are supported by your system, run locale -a, which outputs a list of available locales. Note that Puppet might not have localized strings for every available locale.

To check the current status of environment variables that might conflict with or override your locale settings, use the set command. For example, this command lists the set environment variables and searches for those containing LANG or LC_:

sudo set | egrep 'LANG|LC_'

Checking your locale settings on Windows

To check your current locale setting, run the Get-WinSystemLocale command from PowerShell.

PS C:\> Get-WinSystemLocale
LCID             Name             DisplayName
----             ----             -----------
1033             en-US            English (United States)

To check your system’s current code page setting, run the chcp command.

Setting your locale on *nix with an environment variable

You can use environment variables to set your locale for processes started on the command line. For most Linux distributions, set the LANG variable to your preferred locale, and the LANGUAGE variable to an empty string. On SLES, also set the LC_ALL variable to an empty string.

For example, to set the locale to Japanese for a terminal session on SLES:

export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=''
export LC_ALL=''

To set the locale for the Puppet agent service, you can add these export statements to:

/etc/sysconfig/puppet on RHEL and its derivatives
/etc/default/puppet on Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives

After updating the file, restart the Puppet service to apply the change.

Setting your locale for the Puppet agent service on macOS

To set the locale for the Puppet agent service on macOS, update the LANG setting in the /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.puppetlabs.puppet.plist file.

<dict>
        <key>LANG</key>
        <string>ja_JP.UTF-8</string>
</dict>

After updating the file, restart the Puppet service to apply the change.

Setting your locale on Windows

On Windows, Puppet uses the LANG environment variable if it is set. If not, it uses the configured region, as set in the Administrator tab of the Region control panel.

On Windows 10, you can use PowerShell to set the system locale:

Set-WinSystemLocale en-US

Disabling internationalized strings

Puppet 5.3.2 added the optional Boolean disable_i18n setting, which you can configure in puppet.conf. If set to true, Puppet disables localized strings in log messages, reports, and parts of the command-line interface. This can improve performance when using Puppet modules, especially if environment caching is disabled, and even if you don’t need localized strings or the modules aren’t localized. This setting is false by default in open source Puppet.

If you’re experiencing performance issues, configure this setting in the [master] section of the Puppet master’s puppet.conf file. To force unlocalized messages, which are in English by default, configure this section in a node’s [main] or [user] sections of puppet.conf.

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