At PuppetConf 2017, Puppet Tasks were introduced as part of the new project Bolt. A task allows you to run a program on an arbitrary number of nodes. The program can be just about anything, it just needs to be written in a language that the target nodes can run. For Linux, that means pretty much anything – bash, python, perl, ruby, etc. On Windows, you’re a little more limited out of the box – powershell primarily. Bolt is not yet at version 1.0.0, so I suspect language support for Windows will change. You can use Bolt on its own (even without Puppet, apparently), and starting with Puppet Enterprise 2017.3, you can use Bolt at the PE Console as “tasks” in the UI.
For my first task, I simply want to run a single command on a list of nodes. While I can run arbitrary commands with the bolt command line, I want the practice of writing a task. My use case involves an external authentication system that manages users, ssh keys, and sudo configurations. When a change is made, nodes need to pull the changes. Often, a delay there does not matter – the nodes will receive the change soon enough – but sometimes I want the relevant nodes to pick it up immediately. To do so, I need it to run a single perl script, sanitized as /usr/bin/external_auth.pl, and I want to do it on all the nodes with the profile::external_auth class.
rnelson0 