Announce: puppet-agent 1.9.0 released!

[Eric Sorenson]

Hi All,

I’m excited to announce the release of Puppet Agent 1.9.0, which includes Puppet 4.9.0. There’s lots of good stuff in this release, but a few highlights include:

• Hiera 5 - a successor of the experimental Puppet lookup feature - is built into Puppet 4.9. This allows you to have Hiera data embedded in modules as well as per-environment hierarchies, provides an "explain" feature for easy debugging, and has significant performance improvements. Read more here: https://docs.puppet.com/puppet/latest/lookup_quick.html

• Fixes for several bugs related to Unicode and UTF-8 support in Puppet.

• New fact: `cloud`. This new top-level fact is intended for discovering whether a node is running on a given public cloud provider. In this first release, it currently detects whether a Linux-based node is running in Azure, and provides that information in the cloud.provider fact.

Deprecations in this release include deprecations of several Puppet faces, as well as Puppet support for the Ruby 2.0 series.

For a complete list of Puppet 4.9.0 features, bug fixes, and deprecations, please see the release notes at https://docs.puppet.com/puppet/4.9/release_notes.html.

Special thanks to community member Shawn Ferry for contributing several fixes for Puppet on Solaris.

Two caveats:

In Puppet 4.9.0, we removed the vendored `semantic` gem, replacing it with `semantic_puppet`. We learned this causes an issue with any module based on https://github.com/garethr/puppet-module-skeleton/, since the skeleton loads the `semantic` gem from Puppet's vendor dir to validate a module's metadata.json. We’re planning to ship a Puppet 4.9.1 gem ASAP that will warn that this has been removed (but does not fail directly). https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-7156

Additionally, if you have a "classic" hiera.yaml config file in an environment root (perhaps because your control repository has one checked in, and r10k deploys it into /etc/puppet/code/environments/<environment>/hiera.yaml), you'll see the error "a hiera.yaml version 3 cannot be used in an environment". This will become a warning instead of a hard error, and until then you can move it into a subdirectory where it will be ignored. https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-7165

New Platform Support

• This release adds puppet-agent packages for Fedora 25.

EOL Platforms

As of this release, we are no longer providing puppet-agent packages for the following platforms:
• Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)
• Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily)
• Mac OS X 10.9
• SLES 10
• Fedora 22

To install or upgrade Puppet Agent, follow the getting started directions: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/latest/reference/index.html

For information on upcoming platform end-of-life (EOL) for Puppet Agent, please see our Platform Support Lifecycle page: https://puppet.com/content/platform-support-lifecycle


Eric Sorenson - eric.s...@puppet.com
director of product, puppet ecosystem