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Asked: 2011-02-01 09:38:13 +0800 CST

What's new in Puppet since 2007?

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I've got a copy of the Pulling Strings with Puppet book (written in 2007) but given that it has a bunch of equivocal language, I'm wonder how much has changed since then? I've found this Release Notes page and a (short) summery table at the top of the language tutorial but neither have dates, so I don't know where to start (and the more detailed notes make for rather dry reading).

Does anyone know of a page that list thing that have changed since that book was published?

puppet documentation

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The main user-visible differences since 0.23.x are:

    • more language features like better conditionals - the Language Tutorial that you found is definitely the best way to find out what's available in manifests now.
    • all your manifests and plugins (custom facts, custom types and providers) should now be in a module directory structure and you should be using 'include mymodule::classname' instead of 'import /path/to/manifest.pp'
    • as a corollary, puppet:// URLS for file sources now need to have the module path in them, like puppet:///modules/mymodule/classname/file.txt would live on the filesystem at _modulepath_/mymodule/files/classname/file.txt
    • the CLI has been unified to a 'git' or 'svn' style single program with command arguments, like 'puppet agent' instead of a separate 'puppetd'. That's described on the Tools page
    • there are more built-in types and providers available, like the yumrepo, and zfs types, and zypper, freebsd , portage package providers.

    There are big structural changes under the hood (on-the-wire communication moved from XMLRPC to a REST interface) but they're mostly invisible for every day use. The ones above are probably what trip up the most people, based on mailing list/irc inquiries.

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  2. See the Changelog. There were quite a few updates in the past months.

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  3. Here's an easier to parse list compared to the changelog: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Release_Notes

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