Docs: Installation Guide

Installation Guide

This guide covers in-depth installation instructions and options for Puppet on a wide-range of operating systems.

Before Starting

You will need to install Puppet on both managed nodes and the central Puppet master server(s) in order to run puppet in client server mode. If you will just be running Puppet standalone you don’t need a Puppet master server and installation on just one machine will suffice.

You may want to consider installing Puppet Enterprise for the easiest installation path, if you need professional support, or if some of the additional features built on Puppet would be useful. Check out the comparison and read the FAQ to see if it might be right for you.

For most platforms, you can install ‘puppet’ via your package manager of choice. For a few platforms, you will need to install using the tarball or RubyGems.

INFO: For instructions on installing puppet using a distribution-specific package manager, consult your operating system documentation. Volunteer contributed operating system packages can also be found on the downloads page

Ruby Prerequisites

The only prerequisite for Puppet that doesn’t come as part of the Ruby standard library is facter, which is also developed by Puppet Labs.

All other prerequisites Ruby libraries should come with any standard Ruby 1.8.2+ install. Should your OS not come with the complete standard library (or you are using a custom Ruby build), these include:

  • base64
  • cgi
  • digest/md5
  • etc
  • fileutils
  • ipaddr
  • openssl
  • strscan
  • syslog
  • uri
  • webrick
  • webrick/https
  • xmlrpc

NOTE: We strongly recommend using the version of Ruby that comes with your system, since that will have a higher degree of testing coverage. If you feel the particular need to build Ruby manually, you can get the source from ruby-lang.org.

OS Packages

If installing from a distribution maintained package, such as those listed on the Downloading Puppet Wiki Page all OS prerequisites should be handled by your package manager. See the Wiki for information on how to enable repositories for your particular OS. Usually the latest stable version is available as a package. If you would like to do puppet-development or see the latest versions, however, you will want to install from source.

Installing Facter From Source

The facter library is a prerequisite for Puppet. Like Puppet, there are packages available for most platforms, though you may want to use the tarball if you would like to try a newer version or are using a platform without an OS package:

Get the latest tarball:

$ wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/facter/facter-latest.tgz

Untar and install facter:

$ gzip -d -c facter-latest.tgz | tar xf -
$ cd facter-*
$ sudo ruby install.rb # or become root and run install.rb

There are also gems available in the download directory.

Installing Puppet From Source

Using the same mechanism as Facter, install the puppet libraries and executables:

# get the latest tarball
$ wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-latest.tgz
# untar and install it
$ gzip -d -c puppet-latest.tgz | tar xf -
$ cd puppet-*
$ sudo ruby install.rb # or become root and run install.rb

You can also check the source out from the git repo:

$ mkdir -p ~/git && cd ~/git
$ git clone git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet
$ cd puppet
$ sudo ruby ./install.rb

To install into a different location you can use:

$ sudo ruby install.rb --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin

Alternative Install Method: Using Ruby Gems

You can also install Facter and Puppet via gems:

  $ wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/gems/facter-1.5.7.gem
  $ sudo gem install facter-1.5.7.gem
  $ wget http://puppetlabs.com/downloads/gems/puppet-0.25.1.gem
  $ sudo gem install puppet-0.25.1.gem

Find the latest gems here

For more information on Ruby Gems, see the Gems User Guide

WARNING: If you get the error, in require: no such file to load, define the RUBYOPT environment variable as advised in the post-install instructions of the RubyGems User Guide.

Learning and Configuring Puppet

Now that the packages are installed, start Learning Puppet or see Configuring Puppet for setup instructions.