Upgrading from Puppet 3 to 4¶

This wiki page is a work in progress for the release of Foreman 1.12 and is currently incomplete.

This wiki page is a rough guide on how to upgrade from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4 when using Foreman. It doesn't replace Puppet's own documentation - you need to take both into account, and it's not for the faint-hearted.

Remember, Puppet is a separate piece of software to Foreman. Foreman integrates with Puppet in only a few places (e.g. reports, ENC and smart proxy class imports) but the Foreman installer may have set it up for you initially. Most of the work is changing the Puppet installation and then updating paths and configs in Foreman to suit.

If you're unfamiliar with how Puppet works, then you should consider setting up a new installation and migrating hosts instead.

Planning¶

Ensure you are running Foreman 1.12 or higher, previous versions are not compatible with Puppet 4, while 1.12 is compatible with both 3 and 4, so carry out that upgrade first. See Upgrading to Foreman 1.12 for more information.

Start with Puppet 3.x to 4.x: Get upgrade-ready - it has many excellent points, including:

• As with any upgrade, the smaller the step, the easier it will be. Ensure you've already upgraded to the latest 3.x release and fixed any deprecations from the release notes before moving to 4. This will save time later.
• Ensure your Puppet modules are going to be compatible with Puppet 4's new ("future") parser
• Plan to upgrade your masters before your agents, because the master can serve older agents, but not the other way around.
• Back up everything, especially SSL keys and certificates.

The guide will assume you're using regular 'puppet' packages either from your OS (or EPEL) or from Puppet Labs repositories. Puppet 4 packages are All-In-One (AIO) packages and work quite differently, introducing lots of new paths for config files and binaries. More information on these at:

• Welcome to Puppet Collections
• About Puppet collections and packages