If you missed the news this past week, the Puppet 5 Platform was released! Read the announcement and the release notes for some great details. Congratulations to everyone at Puppet for getting this new release out the door. I’m looking forward to diving in with it as soon as a Puppet Enterprise release is out, since I’ve converted even my home lab away from Puppet Opensource.

There are a few things I’ve learned from the announcement thread, slack, and my own experiences with it in the last few days. It’s still early, so I am sure this will get out of date quickly, but I hope it helps others in the short term.

• Puppet 5 AIO provides Ruby 2.4.1, so your tests should use it as well – even if you’re not using AIO puppet, it’s still helpful for any puppet modules.
• PuppetDB requires postgresql96, but it’s not a dependency on the puppetdb package, since you can install puppetdb and postgresql on different hosts. Version 4.x works with postgresql96, so upgrade that first, then puppet. Detail here.
• Puppet 5 includes a vendored version of the semantic_puppet gem. In Puppet 4.7 and below, it had a dependency on the external semantic_puppet getm. The gem is used by metadata-json-lint, which is often part of a puppet rspec test setup. Check out the metadata-json-lint README installation section to see how to deal with this. If your tests run against ~> 4.0 then you’re probably okay.
• There’s a new version of puppetlabs_spec_helper that apparnetly has some issues with spec fixtures and symlinks (from slack, nothing to quote). I haven’t hit this myself, it might already be fixed, but something to be aware of if you have symlink-related issues during testing.
• The combination of Puppet 5, rpsec-puppet, and the new puppetlabs_spec_helper are more stringent than Puppet 4 is. I’m not sure which of the three components specifically triggers it. I was testing for a resource that required another service, which was not part of the define I was testing (here). With puppet 4, this was fine, but with puppet 5, it started generating errors in this travis run. The fix is simple, through using a pre_condition to provide the service in the catalog, seen in this commit.
• The first Puppet Enterprise release including Puppet 5 should be out sometime this fall.

That’s all I’ve run into so far. One last thing, here is a .travis.yml for testing component modules with both Puppet 4 and 5. You only need to update the matrix section, if you already have one, but I thought the whole thing might be helpful for those who don’t have tests yet.:

---
language: ruby
sudo: false
cache: bundler
notifications:
  email:
  on_failure: always
branches:
  only:
  - master
bundler_args: --without development system_tests
before_install: rm Gemfile.lock || true
script: bundle exec rake test
matrix:
  fast_finish: true
  include:
  - rvm: 2.3.1
    env: PUPPET_GEM_VERSION="~> 4.0" STRICT_VARIABLES=yes
  - rvm: 2.4.1
    env: PUPPET_GEM_VERSION="~> 5.0" STRICT_VARIABLES=yes