Overlook InfraTech is proud to sponsor OpenVox, the community-led open source implementation of Puppet. As of release 8.11, OpenVox is functionally equivalent to Puppet; the command names are the same, the configuration file paths are the same, etc. The major differences are in help text output, man pages, and so on. This means that you can continue to use all the commands, modules, tooling, etc that you’re used to, but at this time you cannot install both Puppet and OpenVox on the same system.

🚨 Before you enable and install the packages, be forewarned that these are still experimental packages only. We do not yet have a fully robust test pipeline, although that is our next priority.

Uninstalling Puppet

We encourage you to try out OpenVox on a fresh test system, the way you would for any major system package. If you’d rather try it on an existing system or develop a migration process, then you will first have to uninstall Puppet.

You do not need to purge configuration files because OpenVox will continue to use them as they are. However, before getting started on the migration you should strongly consider backing up the entire /etc/puppetlabs/ tree in case of accidents.

  • If you’re migrating from Puppet Enterprise you can use the puppet-enterprise-uninstaller script on each node as described in their docs.
  • If you’re using the all-in-one packages such as puppet-agent or puppetserver from the [apt|yum].puppet.com repos, simply remove these packages.
  • If you’re using distro provided packages, then you might have a bigger job. For example, if you’re using Debian packages, you may have several Puppet modules packaged as .deb packages that you’ll have to move to your Puppetfile. You might consider waiting until your distro packages OpenVox.
    • If you do want to migrate now, then remove any puppet packages and dependencies you have installed using your distro tools.
      • Debian family
        • apt autoremove <packagename>
      • RedHat family
        • yum autoremove <packagename>
    • You might also consider (carefully) cleaning up unused dependencies afterwards by running apt or yum autoremove without a package name.

You do not need to remove the [apt|yum].puppet.com repositories although the only thing you’ll be able to use them for going forward is installing historical Puppet releases.

Installation

First enable the repository, based on your Linux distribution. Choose the appropriate openvox8-release repo package from either of these locations and install it.

Then install the packages you want.

  • Debian family
    • apt install openvox-agent
    • apt install openvox-server
    • apt install openvoxdb
  • RedHat family
    • yum install openvox-agent
    • yum install openvox-server
    • yum install openvoxdb

If you have backed up config files, then restore them now.

Sponsorship

Many thanks to Lance and the OSU Open Source Lab. They do so much for the open source world and deserve far far more recognition for it.