Task Modules Release Announcement

[Davin Hanlon]

Hi everyone!

The Puppet Modules team is excited to launch tasks in existing modules, and also to provide generic task modules for performing standard functions. We're releasing eleven modules in total with tasks: four existing modules have been updated to have tasks added; and seven new task specific modules have been created. This is an exciting evolution for Puppet modules with tasks intended to complement the existing state management capabilities that Puppet provides. We will add further tasks in the future to meet various use cases and we encourage you to add the tasks you'd like to see in your modules. Details of what we're releasing today are below.

New Task Modules

Seven new task modules have been created, as below. They are available on the Forge.

• Package: allowing you to install, uninstall, upgrade and check package status on nodes.
  
• Service: providing you the ability to start, stop, restart, enable, disable and check status of services running on nodes.
  
• Exec: letting you pass commands to remote nodes for execution with the results passed back in standard out.
  
• Resource: allowing you to run the resource command to inspect the value of resources on nodes.
  
• Facter: letting you retrieve facts from nodes.
  
• Puppet.conf: providing you with the ability to get and set your Puppet configuration on nodes.
  
• Bootstrap: letting you install the Puppet Agent on remote nodes.
  

Updates to Existing Modules

Four existing Puppet supported modules have been updated to add tasks to them, as below:

• Apache: now contains a task which will reload the Apache configuration without requiring the service to be restarted.
  
• MySQL and Postgresql: both modules now have a task which will pass a SQL statement to a database host, execute the SQL and return the result.
  
• Apt: has a task that will show you updates that are available to packages, and allow those packages to be updated.
  

In addition to the above Puppet supported modules that have been updated, Google's approved modules have been updated with tasks.

The task modules work with Puppet Enterprise and the open source offering (Bolt) that supports tasks. We enjoyed building this new functionality and are excited by the possibilities it creates. All the content is publicly available in our repositories and we welcome your feedback and contributions. Finally, big shout out to the modules team that built these modules!

Feel free to contact me with feedback!

Thanks,

Davin

Davin Hanlon

Product Owner, Modules

Puppet. The shortest path to better software.