Bolt

Puppet Bolt supports a variety of uses cases, but one in particular is interesting for our use, masterless Puppet catalog applies. In a masterless apply rather than obtaining the catalog from the puppet master the catalog is compiled directly from the source repository. One advantage of a masterless apply is that it can offer faster feedback on code changes, since you don’t need to commit in order to apply or noop your changes against a destination host, i.e.:

# Edit
$ vi modules/example/manifests/init.pp

# Noop to see changes
$ bolt apply --noop -t node.example.com

# Commit
$ git commit -a -m 'add example module'

Other projects which support a masterless workflow:

supply_drop

Install Directions

Install Bolt, not currently in Debian unfortunately

$ wget https://apt.puppet.com/puppet-tools-release-bullseye.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i puppet-tools-release-bullseye.deb
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install puppet-bolt

Delete Bolt’s system module

This module conflicts with our system module, Upstream pull request or rename our module

$ sudo find /opt/puppetlabs/bolt -depth -path '*bolt-modules/system' -exec rm -r '{}' \+

Add bolt utilities to your path

$ git clone gitlab.wikimedia.org:jhathaway/bolt-wmf.git
$ cd bolt-wmf
$ cp bolt-wmf puppet-out-grep ~/.local/bin/

Usage

Noop a server

Saving its output into puppet.out, so we can go through it more carefully

$ bolt-wmf -t mirror1001.wikimedia.org -- apply --noop | tee puppet.out

Look through output

Use the puppet-out-grep script to remove items from the console output that you don't care about

$ puppet-out-grep Exim Nagios

Outstanding Issues

Bolt's system modules conflicts with our system module, Upstream pull request or rename our module
Bolt does not preserve symlinks on files with recurse and source directories, https://github.com/puppetlabs/bolt/issues/3056
PuppetDB queries do not work, nor do exported resources
acme_chief module does not work
Nooping a server with Bolt will take out a Puppet lock, which would block a cron based Puppet run which began after the Bolt run