Overview and requirements

PuppetDB collects data generated by Puppet®. It enables advanced Puppet features like exported resources, and can be the foundation for other applications that use Puppet's data.

Version note

This documentation covers PuppetDB 8, which adds several new features and contains some breaking changes since PuppetDB 7.

See the release notes for information on all changes.

What data?

PuppetDB stores:

  • The most recent facts from every node

  • The most recent catalog for every node

  • Optionally, 14 days (configurable) of event reports for every node

Together, these give you a huge inventory of metadata about every node in your infrastructure and a searchable database of every single resource being managed on any node.

Puppet itself can search a subset of this data using exported resources, which allow nodes to manage resources on other nodes. This is similar to the capabilities of the legacy ActiveRecord storeconfigs interface, but much, much faster. The remaining data is available through PuppetDB's query APIs (see the navigation sidebar for details).

System requirements

*nix server with JVM 11+

Java 17 is recommended, but Java 11 is supported as well.

Standard install: RHEL, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu

Puppet provides PuppetDB packages and a module which simplify the setup of its SSL certificates and init scripts. The packages are available for the following operating systems:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, and 9

  • SuSE Enterprise Linux 12, 15

  • Debian 10 (Buster), and 11 (Bullseye)

  • Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) LTS, 20.04 (Focal), 22.04 (Jammy) LTS

See here for instructions for installing via the PuppetDB module.

See here for instructions for installing from OS packages.

Custom install: Any Unix-like OS

If you're willing to do some manual configuration, PuppetDB can run on any Unix-like OS with JVM 11 or newer, including:

  • Recent MacOS X versions (using built-in support)

  • Nearly any Linux distribution using OpenJDK 11 or Oracle JDK 11

  • Nearly any *nix distribution using OpenJDK 11 or Oracle JDK 11

See here for advanced installation instructions.

PostgreSQL 14

PuppetDB 8 recommends PostgreSQL 14 or later in order to take advantage of new features in PostgreSQL.

PuppetDB requires PostgreSQL 11 or later. If not provided by your distribution, compatible versions of Postgres can be installed from the PGDG (PostgreSQL Global Development Group) repositories. See apt.postgresql.org or yum.postgresql.org for more information.

You can also install a compatible version of Postgres using the puppetlabs-puppetdb module.

Robust Hardware

PuppetDB will be a critical component of your Puppet deployment and should be run on a robust and reliable server.

However, it can do a lot with fairly modest hardware. In benchmarks using real-world catalogs from a customer, a single 2012 laptop (16 GB of RAM, consumer-grade SSD, and quad-core processor) running PuppetDB and PostgreSQL was able to keep up with sustained input from 8,000 simulated Puppet nodes checking in every 30 minutes. Powerful server-grade hardware will perform even better.

The actual requirements will vary wildly depending on your site's size and characteristics. At smallish sites, you may even be able to run PuppetDB on your Puppet Server.

For more on fitting PuppetDB to your site, see our scaling recommendations.