Puppet Server: Installing From Packages

System Requirements

Puppet Server is configured to use 2 GB of RAM by default. If you’d like to just play around with an installation on a Virtual Machine, this much memory is not necessary. To change the memory allocation, see Memory Allocation.

Note: Puppet masters running Puppet Server 2.5 depend on Puppet Agent 1.6.0 or newer, which installs Puppet 4.6 and compatible versions of its related tools and dependencies on the server. Puppet agents running older versions of Puppet Agent can connect to Puppet Server 2.5 — this requirement applies to the Puppet Agent running on the Puppet Server node only.

If you’re also using PuppetDB, check its requirements.

Platforms with Packages

Puppet provides official packages that install Puppet Server 2.4 and all of its prerequisites on the following platforms, as part of Puppet Collections.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Enterprise Linux 6
• Enterprise Linux 7

Debian

• Debian 7 (Wheezy)
• Debian 8 (Jessie)

Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise)
• Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)
• Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily)
• Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)

Quick Start

1. Enable the Puppet package repositories, if you haven’t already done so.

2. Stop the existing Puppet master service. The method for doing this varies depending on how your system is set up.

   If you’re running a WEBrick Puppet master, use: service puppetmaster stop.

   If you’re running Puppet under Apache, you’ll instead need to disable the puppetmaster vhost and restart the Apache service. The exact method for this depends on what your Puppet master vhost file is called and how you enabled it. For full documentation, see the Passenger guide.

   • On a Debian system, the command might be something like sudo a2dissite puppetmaster.
   • On RHEL/CentOS systems, the command might be something like sudo mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/puppetmaster.conf ~/. Alternatively, you can delete the file instead of moving it.

   After you’ve disabled the vhost, restart Apache, which is a service called either httpd or apache2, depending on your OS.

   Alternatively, if you don’t need to keep the Apache service running, you can stop Apache with service httpd stop or service apache2 stop.

3. Install the Puppet Server package by running:

    yum install puppetserver
   

   Or

    apt-get install puppetserver
   

   Note that there is no - in the package name.

4. Start the Puppet Server service:

    systemctl start puppetserver
   

   Or

    service puppetserver start
   

Platforms without Packages

For platforms where no official packages are available, you can build Puppet Server from source. Such platforms are not tested, and running Puppet Server from source is not recommended for production use.

For details, see Running from Source.

Memory Allocation

By default, Puppet Server is configured to use 2GB of RAM. However, if you want to experiment with Puppet Server on a VM, you can safely allocate as little as 512MB of memory. To change the Puppet Server memory allocation, you can edit the init config file.

Location

• /etc/sysconfig/puppetserver — RHEL
• /etc/default/puppetserver — Debian

1. Open the init config file:

    # Modify this if you'd like to change the memory allocation, enable JMX, etc
    JAVA_ARGS="-Xms2g -Xmx2g"
   

   Replace 2g with the amount of memory you want to allocate to Puppet Server. For example, to allocate 1GB of memory, use JAVA_ARGS="-Xms1g -Xmx1g"; for 512MB, use JAVA_ARGS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m".

   For more information about the recommended settings for the JVM, see Oracle’s docs on JVM tuning.

2. Restart the puppetserver service after making any changes to this file.

Reporting Issues

Submit issues to our bug tracker.