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Installing Puppet agent: macOS

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Open source Puppet documentation

  1. Installing with the GUI
  2. Installing on the command line
  3. Upgrading with Puppet

These instructions cover installing Puppet agent on macOS machines.

  1. Before installing Puppet agent, read the pre-install tasks and install Puppet Server.

    Note: If you’ve used older Puppet versions, Puppet 4 changed the locations for a lot of the most important files and directories. See this page for a summary of the changes.

  2. Download the macOS puppet-agent package specific to your version of macOS.

    The puppet-agent package bundles all of Puppet’s prerequisites, so you don’t need to download anything else to install Puppet on an agent node.

    OS X packages are named according to their puppet-agent version and compatible OS X version:

    puppet-agent-<PACKAGE VERSION>.osx<OS X VERSION>.dmg

    For example:

    puppet-agent-1.3.2.osx10.11.dmg

    Note that the filename uses “osx” on newer versions of the operating system, which are called macOS.

    To see which versions of Puppet and its related tools and components are in a given puppet-agent release, as well as release notes for each release, see About Puppet agent.

    Previous package names

    We used some different naming schemes in the puppet-agent 1.2 series before settling on the current convention established in 1.2.5.

    • 1.2.0 through 1.2.2: puppet-agent-<VERSION>-osx-<OS X VERSION>-<ARCH>.dmg. Redundant; OS X only runs on x86_64.
    • 1.2.4: puppet-agent-<VERSION>-<OS X CODE NAME>.dmg. This was too hard for automated tooling to deal with, because OS X’s built-in CLI tools don’t report the code name.

  3. Make sure you can run Puppet executables.

    Puppet’s executables are located in /opt/puppetlabs/bin/, which is not in your PATH environment variable by default.

    This doesn’t matter for Puppet services, so enabling or disabling Puppet agent with launchctl works fine. However, if you’re running any interactive puppet commands, you need to either add the location to your PATH or refer to the executables by their full locations.

    Note: If upgrading from Puppet 3, see our page about which files and directories moved in Puppet 4 and later.

  4. Install Puppet.

    There are three ways to install Puppet on OS X:

    • With the GUI installer.
    • On the command line.
    • With Puppet (if upgrading).

    Regardless which you choose, installing the package will start the puppet and mcollective services. You can later disable these services with launchctl or with sudo puppet resource service <NAME> ensure=stopped enable=false.

  5. Configure critical agent settings.

    Set the server setting to your master’s hostname. The default value is server = puppet, so if your master is reachable at that address, you can skip this.

    For other settings you might want to change, see the list of agent-related settings.

  6. Sign certificates (on the CA master)

    As each agent runs for the first time, it will submit a certificate signing request (CSR) to the certificate authority (CA) Puppet master. You’ll need to log into that server to check for certs and sign them.

    • Run sudo /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet cert list to see any outstanding requests.
    • Run sudo /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet cert sign <NAME> to sign a request.

    After an agent’s certificate is signed, it regularly fetches and applies configurations from the Puppet master.

Installing with the GUI

The Puppet installer on macOS provides a graphic user interface to help with manual installation.

  1. Double-click the puppet-agent disk image you downloaded. This mounts it at /Volumes/<DMG NAME>.

    A Finder window appears showing the disk’s contents: a single puppet-agent-<VERSION>-installer.pkg file.

  2. Double-click the package file, and follow the installer prompts to install it. When installation finishes, Puppet agent and MCollective will be running.

  3. After installing, unmount and delete the disk image.

Installing on the command line

Alternately, you can use the hdiutil and installer commands to mount the disk image and install the package from the command line.

  1. Mount the disk image by running sudo hdiutil mount <DMG FILE>.

  2. Locate the .pkg file in the mounted volume and install it by running sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/<IMAGE>/<PKG FILE> -target /.

    When installation finishes, Puppet agent and MCollective will be running.

  3. After installing, run sudo hdiutil unmount /Volumes/<IMAGE> to unmount the disk image.

  4. Optionally, you can then delete the .dmg file.

Upgrading with Puppet

Puppet includes a package resource provider for macOS that can install .pkg files from a disk image. If you already have Puppet installed, you can use the puppet resource command to upgrade with fewer steps.

  1. Locate the disk image you downloaded, and note both the filename and its full path on disk. Then, run:

    sudo puppet resource package "<NAME>.dmg" ensure=present source=<FULL PATH TO DMG>

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