I recently completed a PE migration from 3.8.4 to 2015.3.3 (puppetserver 2.2.41 and puppet agent 4.3.2). This was a somewhat painful exercise, as we kept running into issues because we had gotten so far behind on upgrades. If you need to perform the same kind of upgrade, I hope this broad-stroke description of the upgrade steps will help you. Before we get to the upgrade, let’s cover some of the pre-requisites.

Release Notes

Always read the release notes first. I am sure I will cover some of the notes below in specific problems we ran into, but there’s a lot on there that we did NOT encounter.

Future Parser

When you get to PE 2015.3.3, you’ll be running Puppet 4. Make sure you have the future parser enabled on your master or agents, by following these instructions. You’ll likely run into at least one issue if you weren’t doing this before. For example, automatic string/array conversions may not work as you expect. Get your code up to par before moving forward.

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If you maintain more than one Puppet module, you’ve probably spent some time aligning changes in your general setup by hand – rspec helpers, Gemfile, Rakefile, your travis config, etc. Once you have a third or a fourth module, you find that does not scale. Thankfully, there’s a great tool to help automate this: Modulesync.

How It Works

We’ll discuss how modulesync works first, so that we understand how to set it up. For instance, to perform a dry run, you would run msync update –noop in a modulesync configuration repo. This creates a directory modules and clones the managed modules into that directory. For each module, it then describes the diffs between the existing contents of the module and the config defined by the modulesync configuration repo. Once the changes are reviewed for accuracy, run msync update -m “Commit message here” and the diffs are applied to the default branch (master) with the commit message specified. By creating a modulesync.yml file, the default namespace and branch can be specified. The use of a different branch name allows you to create a PR to apply the changes.

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