Puppet Bolt is an open-source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use Bolt to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow. For example, you can use Bolt to patch and update systems, troubleshoot servers, deploy applications, or stop and restart services. Bolt can be installed on your local workstation and connects directly to remote targets with SSH or WinRM, so you are not required to install any agent software.
Puppet Bolt allows you to leverage the power of Puppet without having to install a puppet master or puppet agents on devices or remote nodes. Much like Ansible, Puppet Bolt connects to devices by using an SSH key or WinRM connections. Puppet Bolt is an open-source orchestration tool that is based on the Ruby language and can be installed as a single package.
In Puppet Bolt, tasks can be used for pushing configuration and for managing services, such as starting and stopping services and deploying applications. Tasks are sharable. For example, users can visit Puppet Forge to find and share tasks with others in the community. Tasks are really good for solving problems that don’t fit in the traditional model of client/server or puppet master and puppet agent. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Puppet is used to ensure configuration on devices and can periodically validate that the change or specific value is indeed configured. Puppet Bolt allows you to execute a change or configuration immediately and then validate it. There are two ways to use Puppet Bolt:
- Orchestrator-driven tasks: Orchestrator-driven tasks can leverage the Puppet architecture to use services to connect to devices. This design is meant for large-scale environments.
- Standalone tasks: Standalone tasks are for connecting directly to devices or nodes to execute tasks and do not require any Puppet environment or components to be set up in order to realize the benefits and value of Puppet Bolt.
Individual commands can be run from the command line tool by using the following command, command bolt command run command name followed by the list of devices to run the command against. In addition to manually running the commands, you can construct scripts that contain multiple commands. You can construct these scripts in Python, Ruby, or any other scripting language that the devices can interpret. After a script is built, you can execute it from the command line against the remote devices that need to be configured, using the command bolt script run script name followed by the list of devices to run the script against. Figure 29-14 shows a list of some of the available commands for Puppet Bolt.
Puppet Bolt copies the script into a temporary directory on the remote device, executes the script, captures the results, and removes the script from the remote system as if it were never copied there. This is a really clean way of executing remote commands without leaving residual scripts or files on the remote devices.
Much as in the Cisco DNA Center and Cisco vManage APIs, Puppet Bolt tasks use an API to retrieve data between Puppet Bolt and the remote device. This provides a structure for the data that Puppet Bolt expects to see. Tasks are part of the Puppet modules and use the naming structure modulename::taskfilename. Tasks can be called from the command line much like commands and scripts. You use the command bolt task run modulename::taskfilename to invoke these tasks from the command line. The modulename::taskfilename naming structure allows the tasks to be shared with other users on Puppet Forge. A task is commonly accompanied by a metadata file that is in JSON format. A JSON metadata file contains information about a task, how to run the task, and any comments about how the file is written. Often, the metadata file is named the same as the task script but with a JSON extension. This is a standard way of sharing documentation about what a script can do and how it is structured. You can see this documentation by running the command bolt task show modulename::taskfilename at the command line.
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