Announcing Puppet Server 2.3.0 / Puppet 4.4.0

[Eric Sorenson]

Subject: Announcing Puppet Server 2.3.0 / Puppet 4.4.0

I'm really excited to announce the arrival of new feature releases:

Puppet 4.4.0 and Puppet Server 2.3.0. The headline feature here is 

Static Catalogs: file resources with 'puppet:///' source attributes

will now include the checksum of the file inside the catalog, rather

than requiring additional http requests to the master as the catalog

is being applied. This both dramatically improves performance and closes

a "loophole" where agents could get file content that didn't match the

catalog's original intent.  You can read more (much, much more) about this

on the doc site: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/4.4/reference/static_catalogs.html

In addition, there are several other noteworthy features including an

awesome community contribution:

* Felix Frank worked tirelessly to close a very long-standing feature

  request that ties in with static catalogs: HTTP(S) file sources.

  Now you can use plain http webservers as the `source` for file resources,

  so if you have content that's large in size or managed outside Puppet's

  fileserver, you can just point at it. Vielen dank, Felix! (PUP-1073)

  

* There's a new API endpoint in the Puppet Server, `environment_classes`, that

  improves upon the old resource_types endpoint to enumerate classes, their

  parameters, and default values. (SERVER-1110)

* The Puppet Server now reloads configuration immediately upon receiving a 

  HUP signal, lowering restart times if you are changing values. (SERVER-86)

* The Puppet 4 Language continues to improve: now you can alias Types directly

  in your manifests, there's a new Iterable type, and you can now reference

  earlier parameters in a class, define, or function. (various tickets)

There's a lot more, so please read the release notes for details:

Puppet Server: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetserver/latest/release_notes.html

Puppet: https://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/release_notes.html

Puppet 4.4.0 is contained inside the puppet-agent-1.4.0 package that Melissa

announced yesterday, as well as being independently downloadable as a gem or

tarball

To install or upgrade puppet-agent, follow the getting started directions: 

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/index.html