Minor upgrades: From Puppet 4 and within Puppet 5.x

A minor upgrade is an upgrade from Puppet 4 to Puppet 5, or from one Puppet 5 release to another. The order in which you upgrade packages is important. Always upgrade puppetserver on your masters before you upgrade agents. You can upgrade PuppetDB before or after you upgrade other nodes.

Upgrade Puppet Server

Upgrade Puppet Server on the masters before upgrading any agents.

Note: Your Puppet masters are responsible for maintaining your site’s infrastructure, and upgrading them disrupts their activities. If you only use one master, all Puppet services will be unavailable during the upgrade; avoid reconfiguring any Puppet-managed servers until your master is back up. If you use multiple load-balanced servers, upgrade them individually to avoid Puppet downtime or problems synchronizing configurations.

The puppetserver package depends on the puppet-agent package, and your node’s package manager automatically upgrades puppet-agent if the new version of puppetserver requires it.

1. To upgrade the puppetserver package and its dependencies on masters that use apt, run:

   # apt-get update
   # apt-get install --only-upgrade puppetserver
   

   On masters that use yum, run:

   # yum update puppetserver
   

Note: If you pinned or held your Puppet packages to a specific version, remove the pins or holds before continuing. On systems that use apt, remove any special .pref files from /etc/apt/preferences.d/ that pin Puppet packages, and use the apt-mark unhold command on each held package. For yum packages locked with the versionlock plugin, edit /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list and remove the Puppet lock.

Upgrade Puppet on agents

You should regularly upgrade Puppet on agents, and in most cases you shouldn’t need to do anything to prepare for such upgrades.

Read the release notes before upgrading to learn about changes that affect specific systems or workflows.

1. To upgrade *nix agents that use apt, run:

   # apt-get update
   # apt-get install --only-upgrade puppet-agent
   

   On *nix agents that use yum, run:

   # yum update puppet-agent
   

On Windows agents, follow the installation guide to upgrade installed Puppet packages. You do not need to uninstall Puppet first unless you’re changing from 32-bit Puppet to the 64-bit version. Running 32-bit Puppet on 64-bit Windows is now deprecated, so you should update your Puppet’s architecture to match your system.

Note: If you installed Puppet into a custom directory and are moving from a 32-bit version to a 64-bit version, you must specify the INSTALLDIR option and any other relevant MSI properties when re-installing.

On macOS, follow the installation guide to upgrade installed Puppet packages. You don’t need to uninstall Puppet first.

Upgrade PuppetDB

Upgrade PuppetDB nodes independently of masters and agents.

You can automate PuppetDB upgrades using the version parameter of the puppetlabs/puppetdb module’s puppetdb::globals class.

1. To manually upgrade the puppetdb package on nodes that use apt, run:

   # apt-get update
   # apt-get install --only-upgrade puppetdb
   

   On nodes that use yum, run:

   # yum update puppetdb
   

2. When you upgrade PuppetDB, you must also upgrade the puppetdb-termini package on all Puppet masters.

   To upgrade it on masters that use apt, run:

   # apt-get update
   # apt-get install --only-upgrade puppetdb-termini
   

   On masters that use yum, run:

   # yum update puppetdb-termini