running puppet agent manually under debian

[rektide]

the debian puppet package has a puppet agent running. this creates a /
var/run/puppet/agent.pid file. when i run `sudo puppet agent`, i get:

Could not prepare for execution: Could not create PID file: /var/run/
puppet/agent.pid

this prevents me from applying a change i want to make right now.

in debian, assuming the user has installed the puppet package and thus
has a puppet agent running, what steps should one take to manually run
puppet agent (that is, to have puppet run)? certainly there must be a
non-full-of-shit option that doesnt entail stopping the daemon,
manually running, then restarting the agent?

[Nigel Kersten]

Send USR1 to the puppet agent process.

kill -USR1 $(cat /var/lib/puppet/run/agent.pid)

and it will reload and run.

[Patrick]

On Apr 8, 2011, at 10:34 AM, rektide wrote:
> in debian, assuming the user has installed the puppet package and thus
> has a puppet agent running, what steps should one take to manually run
> puppet agent (that is, to have puppet run)? certainly there must be a
> non-full-of-shit option that doesnt entail stopping the daemon,
> manually running, then restarting the agent?

Nigel sent you an option to tell the currently running daemon to trigger a new run right now. You can also manually run puppet in a way that will give you more immediate feedback like this:

puppetd -- verbose -- no-daemonize --onetime

This will run another puppet process, which will terminate when the run is over. The original process will do nothing, and continue to run, unchanged by this command.