If you’ve been following with the Puppet series, your VMs probably started with Puppet 3.4.x or earlier. In the time since, Puppet has released up through v3.6.1 that brings a lot of improvements. However, if you simply upgrade your master and nodes, you’ll run into a few warnings about deprecations and future deprecations. Let’s take a look at the issues and how to resolve them. As always, read the release notes so that you understand the changes and test in a lab to ensure there is no negative impact.

Note: You MUST upgrade your nodes to v3.6.1 as well as the master, or you may receive fatal errors on the nodes. We haven’t gotten there yet, but if you have mcollective installed and configured, it’s a great way to upgrade your nodes at the same time.

Here’s the first item you’ll see:

[rnelson0@puppet ~]$ sudo puppet agent --test --noop
Warning: Setting modulepath is deprecated in puppet.conf. See http://links.puppetlabs.com/env-settings-deprecations
   (at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/settings.rb:1067:in `each')
Warning: Setting manifestdir is deprecated. See http://links.puppetlabs.com/env-settings-deprecations
   (at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/settings.rb:1071:in `each')

You can fix this by implementing environment directories. Here’s the diff I made:

[rnelson0@puppet ~]$ diff puppet.conf.org /etc/puppet/puppet.conf
15,16c15
<     modulepath = /etc/puppet/environments/$environment/modules:/opt/puppet/share/puppet/modules
<     manifestdir = /etc/puppet/environments/$environment/manifests
---
>     environmentpath = $confdir/environments

If you actually do have global modules under /opt, add a basemodulepath key and value. Now when you run another test, you may see some errors as it “fixes” itself. Run it a second time and you’ll see this:

[rnelson0@puppet ~]$ sudo puppet agent --test --noop
...
Warning: The package type's allow_virtual parameter will be changing its default value from false to true in a future release. If you do not want to allow virtual packages, please explicitly set allow_virtual to false.
   (at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/type.rb:816:in `set_default')

This is a warning that something will be deprecated. You can read about the issue here. As the link says, it’s easy to fix this. In your puppet repo, add these lines to the top of manifests/site.pp:

Package {
  allow_virtual => true,
}

If you run puppet again, you’ll notice the warnings are gone!

One last note, if you get some spurious warnings, restart the puppet master service. In my lab, I didn’t need to do this, but in production I had to. I assume it’s because I did something out of order, but I couldn’t identify what that was.