Run Puppet agent on demand

Some sites prefer to run Puppet agent on-demand, and others use scheduled runs along with the occasional on-demand run.

You can start Puppet agent runs while logged in to the target system, or remotely with Bolt or MCollective.

Run Puppet agent on one machine, using SSH to log into it:

ssh ops@magpie.example.com sudo puppet agent --test

Results

To run remotely on multiple machines, you need some form of orchestration or parallel execution tool, such as Bolt or MCollective with the puppet agent plugin.

As of Puppet agent 5.5.4, MCollective is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Puppet agent. If you use open source Puppet, migrate MCollective agents and filters using tools like Bolt and PuppetDB’s https://puppet.com/docs/puppetdb/.