Puppet 0.25.0 – code-named “Elmo” has been released!  Luke, everyone at ReductiveLabs, the community and I have all put a lot of work into this release … and blood, sweat, potentially some tears and probably a lot of bourbon.

The tarball is available at:

http://reductivelabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-0.25.0.tar.gz

And the Ruby Gem at:

http://reductivelabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-0.25.0.gem

What’s Changed?

There are substantial changes in Puppet 0.25.0 and more changes to come in the future.  Most of the changes in 0.25.0 are internal refactoring rather than behavioural.  The 0.25.0 release should be fully backwards compatible behaviourally with the 0.24.x branch.

This means a 0.25.0 master will be able to manage 0.24.x clients. You will need, however, to upgrade both your master and your clients to take advantage of all the new features and the substantial gains in performance offered by 0.25.0.

The principal change is the introduction of Indirected REST to replace XML-RPC as the underlying Puppet communications mechanism. This is a staged change with some functions migrated in this release and some in the next release.  In the first stage of the Indirected REST implementation the following functions have been migrated:

• Certificates
• Catalogue
• Reports
• Files

In 0.26.0 (the next release) the following remaining functions will be migrated:

• Filebucket
• Resource handler
• Runner handler
• Status handler

The new REST implementation also comes with authorisation configuration in a similar style to the namespaceauth used for XML-RPC.  This new authorisation is managed through the auth.conf file (there is an example file in the conf directory of the
tarball). This does not yet fully replace the namespaceauth.conf file but will when the remaining handlers are migrated to REST.  It works in a similar way to the namespaceauth.conf file and the example file contains additional documentation.

As a result of the introduction of REST and other changes you should see substantial performance improvements in this release.  These particularly include improvements in:

• File serving
• The performance of large graphs with lots of edges
• Stored configuration (see also Puppet Queuing below)

Other new features include (this is not a complete list – please see the Roadmap for all tickets closed in this release):

Deprecations

Custom types and facts in modules have been moved from the module/plugins to module/lib. Please rename your directories.

The module name must now be specified in source attributes of the file type, i.e.

file { "file":
source => "puppet://server/module/file",
}

Binary-specific configuration files, such as puppetd.conf or puppetmasterd.conf are now totally deprecated and ignored.

Passenger

Ensure you have the latest version of the config.ru file from the ext/rack/files/ directory in the tarball.

Rails

Rails versions up to 2.3.x are now supported.

New Language Features

Regular expression matching is now possible in node definitions.

node /web|db/ {
include blah
}

node /^(foo|bar)\.example\.com$/ {
include blah
}

Puppet now also allows regular expressions in if statements with the use
of the =~ (match) and !~ (not match) operators.

if $uname =~ /Linux|Debian/ {
...
}

Also available are ephemeral variables ($0 to $9) in the current scope
which contain regex captures:

if $uname =~ /(Linux|Debian)/ {
notice("this is a $1 system")
}

Similar functionality is available in case and selector statements:

$var = "foobar"
case $var {
"foo": {
notify { "got a foo": }
}
/(.*)bar$/: {
notify{ "hey we got a $1": }
}
}

$val = $test ? {
/^match.*$/ => "matched",
default => "default"
}


New functions

There are four new functions:

require – Similar to the include function but creates a dependency on the required class in the current class.  This means the required class will be loaded before the current class is processed.

split – allows you to split strings and arrays

versioncmp – allows you to compare versions

shellquote – Quote and concatenate arguments for use in the shell, for example as part of Exec type commands.

Command Line Compile & Apply

Puppet now has the capability to compile a catalogue and output it in JSON from the Puppet master.  You can do this via the –compile command line option.

# puppetmasterd --compile nodename

Corresponding with this feature is the ability to apply a JSON configuration from the puppet binary using the –apply option.

# puppet --apply cataloguefile

Or you can use – to read the JSON in from standard input.  Puppet will then compile and apply the configuration.

Thin Stored Configuration

0.25.0 also introduces the concept of “thin” stored configurations. This is a version of stored configuration that only stores the facts and exported resources in the database.  This will perform better than full stored configuration but because not all resources are available this may not suit all purposes.

Thin stored configurations are initiated by setting the thin_storeconfigs option on the Puppet master or on the puppetmasterd command line using –thin_storedconfigs.

Puppet Queuing

There is a new binary called puppetqd that supports queuing for stored configurations.  You can read about how it works and how to implement it at:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/UsingStoredConfiguration

Further documentation is in the README.queuing file in the tarball.

Application Controller

All the logic has been moved out of the binary commands and added to an Application Controller.  You can see the controller code at lib/puppet/application.rb and the logic for each application at lib/puppet/application/binaryname.rb.

Types and Providers

The return values from the Exec type can now be specified as an array.

The SMF and daemontools service providers can now import a configuration file.

The mailist type is now supported on Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora distributions

The NetInfo provider has been deprecated for OSX in favour of the Directory Services provider.

Binary Location Move

To bring Puppet more in line with general packaging standards the puppetd, puppetca, puppetrun, puppetmasterd, and puppetqd binaries now reside in the sbin directory rather than the bin directory when installed from the source package.

Other features

You can find a full list of the tickets closed thus far for version 0.25.0 is at:

http://projects.reductivelabs.com/versions/show/3